Socialism: The Failed Idea that Never Dies | Kristian Niemietz

With the recent news of Zohran Mamdani as the Democratic pick for the mayor of New York City, there is a bit of a buzz about socialism at the moment. Which makes this episode timely, indeed.

Why does socialism keep coming back, even after so many failed experiments? In this episode of Viewpoints, host Sean Rasmussen sits down with Dr. Kristian Niemietz, author of “Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies,” to explore the resurgence of “millennial socialism” and why each new generation believes they can succeed where others have failed.

Niemietz discusses his own intellectual journey from youthful rebellion to classical liberalism, the persistent romanticism surrounding socialism, the cyclical patterns of socialist enthusiasm and disillusionment, and why the lessons of history are often ignored or reinterpreted. From the lessons of the Soviet Union and Venezuela to the modern popularity of DEI and identity politics in the West, this conversation unpacks the economic and social realities behind the rhetoric—and what it means for Canada and beyond. Whether you’re a skeptic, a supporter, or just curious about the ongoing debate, this episode offers a thoughtful, evidence-based perspective on one of the most enduring ideas in politics.

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About the Guest

Transcript

Kristian Niemietz [00:00:00]:
In 2015 16, we had this emergence of what was later called millennial socialism, this rebirth of socialism after about a quarter of a century where we thought it was a widely held view that socialism was basically now a fringe idea. It had been defeated, it had failed in practice, and it was over with the fall of the Berlin Wall and it had receded into maybe the more niche, obscure corners of academia. But in 2015, 16, it made a massive comeback.

Sean Rasmussen [00:00:32]:
This is Viewpoints. I’m Sean Rasmussen. Viewpoints aims to have long form conversations with experts from across the political spectrum trying to provide context and insight into the issues of the day whenever possible. We also try to put it in the Canadian context. Western intellectuals have had a long history of advocating for and defending socialism, even during periods when socialist experiments were proving to be disastrous both economically and on humanitarian grounds. Each generation of thinkers that are drawn to socialism are optimistic that previous failures were because it wasn’t real socialism, and they believe that this time around it’ll be different. My guest today investigates this phenomenon in a book called the Failed Idea that never dies. Dr. Christian Nemetz is head of Political Economy at the London based Institute of Economic Affairs, a research fellow at the Zurich based Liberal Institute, and a senior fellow at the Berlin based Institute for Free Enterprise. He lives in London, England. Christian, welcome to Viewpoints.

Kristian Niemietz [00:01:42]:
Hello. Thanks for the invitation.

Sean Rasmussen [00:01:44]:
Let’s begin with your background. What drew you to economics and policy work? And why did socialism become a topic that you wanted to write about?

Kristian Niemietz [00:01:53]:
Right, so I was initially as a bit of a socialist myself, you could say as a teenager, but a fairly clueless socialist. So this was only skin deep. I was mostly drawn to the rebellious image of socialism. It’s not that I understood Marxist Leninist theory well, but then that is again true of a lot of the millennial socialists today, that it is in part a hipster phenomenon. People are drawn to social image, the vibe of it, and it isn’t necessarily always based on theory. So that, that was definitely my experience. And then at some point, aged 17, 18, I started to realize, oh, actually the market economy is maybe not as terrible as it sounds. I started reading a bit about, well, in basic terms, just how market economies work, how the process of market competition works, the idea that in a market economy you can produce goods and services, other people, that even if you are not a good person yourself, even if you are not altruistic, you can still do that for your own benefit. And you will have to behave as if you were altruistic, as if you cared about other people’s well being because you’re going to have competitors and nobody has to buy from you. The kind of things that I would now consider very basic economics, but which was new to me at the time, combined that with. So I was born in West Germany at the time. I also started to read more about first the post war history, the way the West German economy recovered so quickly after the war, and about this massive gap between the east and the west, which at the time this was all still very recent. So this was maybe eight years or so after reunification, when that was still a constant topic in the news because western Germany had to spend a lot of money on trying to get the eastern states, the former German Democratic Republic, up to Western standards. And so it was just that combination towards market based economics. And then I learned about the free market classical liberal thinkers, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and so forth. And then towards the end I then studied economics in Berlin at Humboldt University. Towards the end of that I learned about the Institute of Economic affairs because I went to a conference in Berlin where the then Director General of the IAEA was one of the speakers and he talked about the history of the Institute and about the concept of what a think tank is, how the idea is to change the climate of opinion and get your ideas to opinion formers and how that had a big effect in post war British history. So especially in the 70s and 80s, turning this statist consensus that existed at the time around. And I was drawn to that. I applied for an internship there and then indirectly found my way back in. Okay, was right range of things. Initially it was. So for example, I did a degree, a postgrad degree at King’s College London at the same time that was about poverty measurement and wrote about healthcare and so forth. I wasn’t thinking about socialism really. That only became a thing when in 201516 we had this emergence of what was later called millennial socialism, this rebirth of socialism after about a quarter of a century where we thought where it was a widely held view that socialism was bas now a fringe idea, it had been defeated, it had failed in practice and it was over with the fall of the Berlin Wall and it had receded into maybe the more niche, obscure corners of academia. But in 201516 it made a massive comeback in various Western countries and that’s what got me to it. I noticed at the time that people on the pro market side, so whether that’s pro market conservatives or free market liberals, libertari or even the more market friendly social democrats, they didn’t really know how to respond to it, to this socialist challenge, because this was just unexpected to them. They all thought, well, there are no socialists anymore. We’re all capitalists of varying degrees. And that’s what got me into this.

Sean Rasmussen [00:06:15]:
Yeah, it was my understanding that people on the right or people who are supportive of free markets dropped the ball on their communications about the values of these things and why they’re important and how they work and kind of open the door for criticisms that may or may not even be legitimate.

Kristian Niemietz [00:06:35]:
And I guess they also thought that it wasn’t really necessary anymore. They thought, well, we’ve seen the results. It’s just obvious that socialist planned economies don’t work. And that’s all there is to know about it. We don’t have to go into the details of why. And then once you had a generation that had grown up without an active memory of the Cold War, or even just this immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and say to them, they didn’t see it as obvious. They just said, well, why not? What’s so bad about socialism? We’ll just do it a bit differently next time, and then it will work. Then a lot of people on the pro market side didn’t know how to respond to that because they didn’t have to explain that in fundamental terms before they could say, oh, it’s just obvious. It would be like if you asked me, well, why does gravity exist? Why can’t I jump up? And then you would think, wait, why do I have to explain this to you? This isn’t this obvious. But. And about 10 years ago, to a lot of people, it’s not obvious at all.

Sean Rasmussen [00:07:31]:
Yeah, apparently it has to kind of go through a process like I find myself now, too. I’ve been reading Hayek and Friedman and all these people, and I’m really excited about it. I feel like I never gave it its due attention before either. Or even for that matter, the amazing achievement of liberalism in the west, you sort of took it for granted. And so now I’m having. Because it’s now being tested by all these various movements that are going now. I’m having to sort of relearn and go back and, you know, understand the principles about why these things are so good and why they worked. Not just why they worked, but also why they’re kind of morally good too, you know.

Kristian Niemietz [00:08:13]:
Yes, it’s easy to forget and it is counterintuitive. So it is something that you really have to read about. It doesn’t come naturally to us. And that’s why As I. Even people who, people who study economics, the first term also is a bit of a struggle with yourself, where you learn things that go against your intuitions and that you may think, well, wait, I don’t want this to be true. I want rent controls to work, I want price controls to work. I want the state to be able to obviously do good things. And learning about how. No, and actually price signals are not arbitrary. They tell us something. You can’t just mess around with them. That’s things that we initially part of our intuition rails against. So it takes some intellectual self discipline to appreciate the benefits of a market economy. You have to sometimes go against what the more intuitive part of yourself tells you.

Sean Rasmussen [00:09:14]:
Some kind of egalitarian, communitarian instinct that we all have, maybe.

Kristian Niemietz [00:09:18]:
Yes, well, we have evolved that way. I mean our hunter gatherer ancestors, if we go back far enough, they lived in small egalitarian communes for most of human history. I mean, even Marx already said that what our ancestors had, our distant prehistorical ancestors, was a kind of primitive communism. And he said, all I’m trying to do is why don’t we recreate that but on a higher level of technological industrial development. And yes, I guess at first that sounds intuitively appealing.

Sean Rasmussen [00:09:55]:
So first of all, your book makes a bold, the book title makes a bold claim that socialism is a failed idea that never dies. Maybe you can expand a bit about on what you mean top level by that idea.

Kristian Niemietz [00:10:08]:
Yeah. So normally in think tank work, whenever we talk about particular policies, particular policy plans, proposals, the first thing that comes to mind when evaluating a policy is you would just ask, okay, has anyone ever done this before? And if so, what were the results? Right. Now that’s not the only thing that you do sometimes it is fair to say, okay, well maybe here and there an idea has been badly implemented or under unfavorable conditions. That’s all well and good, but nonetheless that will be the starting point you look at. Where has this been done? What were the results? And with socialism it’s a bit trickier if you did it, if you judged socialism in that way, then. Well, then this would be a brief conversation now, because there have been about two dozen socialist societies, about two dozen attempts to build socialist economies, the whole of Eastern Europe in the second half of the 20th century, and various experiments in Latin America, in Asia, in Africa. So it’s been tried all over the globe in lots of different ways, shapes and forms. And when you compare it to a nearby market economy that started from similar positions, it’s always the more market based economy that is much richer but also more successful in lots of other ways. So social indicators, even environmental indicators, it’s always very unambiguous that the more market based society is just vastly superior to the socialist society in every respect. And it’s not contest, it’s just that I noticed that, well, I knew this from before that with socialism it doesn’t work that way. So you can’t argue against socialists by saying, well, your ideas have been tried there, there and there. The results were terrible. They will just wave that away and say, well, you’re just stupid, you just don’t understand what socialism means. Obviously I’m not talking about recreating the Soviet Union, Obviously I’m not talking about recreating Maoist China. Obviously I’m not talking about North Korea or Vietnam before they had their relative liberalization. They would just dismiss all that as well. That was just badly understood socialism. That was just either a bad form of it or, or they will even say, well, those were just regimes that had nothing to do with socialism, they just called themselves that. And anyone can just use any name they want to. Right?

Sean Rasmussen [00:12:36]:
Yeah. So before we go any further, maybe we should define what you mean by socialism as you understand it.

Kristian Niemietz [00:12:47]:
Yeah. So I use the classical dictionary definition. Socialism is an economic system based on collective ownership of the means of production, which essentially means a state run economy. So that means you can have a capitalist society with a welfare state, that’s still capitalism. You can have a market economy, a capitalist market economy with a large public sector, that’s also still capitalism. And that might not be my ideal form of capitalism, but disagreements within capitalism, that’s not socialism, that’s entirely separate debate. So I’m not one of those people who use socialism just as a way to slag off the left generically. I don’t call people socialist. I only when I have a good reason to believe that somebody is an actual socialist. But if we look at this new wave of socialists that have come up over the past 10 years or so, this phenomenon that’s being described as millennial socialism, they will very often define socialism in exactly that way too. And they, some of them will very explicitly say, I don’t mean a larger welfare state, I don’t mean a larger public sector, I do mean collective ownership of the means of production. So if you look at organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA and the various newish socialist publications like Jacobin magazine, Current affairs magazine, they will very clearly say, our aim isn’t to be like Sweden, our aim is not to be like Denmark. Our aim is not to be have maybe a health insurance program like Canada or. So they will say those things are maybe nice to have. They’re not opposed to them, but they will say that might be a small step in the right direction. But that is ultimately, that’s just capitalism. That’s not what we want. So basically the short summary is I define socialism in exactly the same way in which the current wave of socialists are also defining it.

Sean Rasmussen [00:14:51]:
Okay, so they’re still into that idea of centralized ownership or like state ownership of a lot of the engines of the economy.

Kristian Niemietz [00:15:02]:
Well, that’s part of the problem. So they will usually not say much about how that is supposed to work in practice. So they’re not going to say there’s going to be a five year plan like in the Soviet Union, just with this or that change in how it works on a procedural level. They will just be very vague, but they will very clearly say, yes, we want worker ownership of the means of production. The people who do the work should also be the ones who own the capital. And they will talk about eradicating that distinction between working somewhere and owning the tools that you work with. And in practice that can only mean state ownership. Yes, modern day socialists are often quite vague when it comes to describing how that’s supposed to work. But yes, they will make clear that I mean proper socialism.

Sean Rasmussen [00:15:56]:
Okay, that’s interesting. I have a friend who’s a socialist, he calls himself a democratic socialist. And he, you know, he looks at things like Scandinavia and, you know, the experiment, the kind of way that they’ve organized their economies as being closer to what he would think would be a good thing to do.

Kristian Niemietz [00:16:18]:
And well, then maybe he needs to talk to his own comrades, because a lot of them would tell him, you’re not one of us, you’re a fake socialist.

Sean Rasmussen [00:16:27]:
Okay, okay, interesting. So in your book you document how these socialist experiments from the Soviet Union to Venezuela often begin with hope and idealism, but then collapse into dysfunction or tyranny. And what are the common patterns or phases that you observed across those cases?

Kristian Niemietz [00:16:50]:
So what normally happens when there’s a socialist revolution somewhere? Initially, Western intellectuals will be super enthusiastic about it. So this happened after the Russian Revolution or certainly in the 1930s when they were building up their collectivized economy. You had hundreds, thousands perhaps of Western intellectuals who were writing about this, about how great the Soviet Union was and how that was the future. And some of them traveled over there, went on guided tours, and then came back completely mesmerized. Star eyed. So this, this was a big thing in the, in the 1930s in, in the Western world, okay, there was a, a socialist who then fell out of love with it. Who then I think who, who wrote a book about this must have been around 1940, which is called the Red Decade. And summarizing that, that kind of zeitgeist of, of the time, okay, what happened later was that then after the Second World War and in the early phases of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was falling out of fashion. And you had lots of Western intellectuals who had previously admired the Soviet Union falling silent on it. They were now no longer interested in it. But most of them didn’t do much soul searching. They didn’t really ask themselves why were we so wrong about this? So that was the first time that this happened, that you had first this enthusiasm, euphoria and then falling silent on it. And then a generation later when you had say the 1960s student radicals, also socialists of sorts, they just openly said, well, the Soviet Union was never socialist. What are you talking about? That’s got nothing to do with us. And you even had, say in the West German version, one of the leaders of the student movement was even originally East German. He had escaped and then tried and was then advocating socialism in West Germany. But, but he always said no, no, no, the system that I’ve escaped from, nothing to do with socialism. So by then they had completely, the, the Western socialists had completely disowned the Soviet Union and the whole Eastern bloc. What they were doing then is they said no, the future is Maoist China. That’s, that’s real socialism. That’s the real deal. They are doing it differently because China was at the time they had fallen out with the Soviet Union. They were even enemies. You had that rivalry which I think at one point even almost led to a war between the Chinese, the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union. And the Western intellectuals used that as a way of saying, well look, this is a completely different experiment. Now it’s going to work. This is the real thing. Similarly with Vietnam, the Vietnamese, or initially just northern Vietnam, the socialists north of Vietnam, that had lots of Western admirers and Cuba, of course, so this was just after the Cuban revolution. So those were the models that Western socialists in the 60s and early 70s were admiring. And then you had this exact same pattern of firstly losing interest in it when it became more obvious what an abysmal failure that was and what horrible societies those really were. And then, well, that just fizzled out again. Then you had a new wave in the 70s where you had some. And this was on a smaller scale, but there were some Western intellectuals who were praising North Korea and some were praising even Cambodia, which is probably the most horrific socialist regimes ever. The Khmer Rouge regime lasted only for four years. Even they had their Western admirers or defenders. You had Noam Chomsky at the time, who was still a young man then. He wrote a paper which was not literally a defense of the Khmer Rouge. He didn’t say they were great guys, it wasn’t like that. But he attacked all of their Western critics. He said everything that you read about that, that model, it’s all just capitalist fabrications. They’re all liars. He never literally said, Pol Pot, the Cambodian dictator is a great guy, but he went after everyone who said a bad word against that regime, which is also a form of effectively taking a side.

Sean Rasmussen [00:21:18]:
Wow, that did not hold up so well, that opinion piece that did not age well now.

Kristian Niemietz [00:21:23]:
Well, but that’s part of the problem that all the people he slagged off in that paper, I mean, even though they were completely right, they are now largely forgotten. So even I can’t remember their names right now. I must have known some of them at some point because they’re in the book. I quoted some of them, but these were largely forgotten, whereas Chomsky just went on to become this rock star intellectual. And that’s usually the problem, that the people who admire socialist regimes for a time and then just backtrack on it. It’s not really held against them. So ideally, somebody like Chomsky should have been discredited by that, and he should have gone into linguistics and stick to that. He should not have been taken seriously as a political economic commentator. But that kind of accountability is sadly missing. So Western intellectuals are held to extremely low standards when they have fashionable opinions, as Noam Chomsky clearly has. But, okay, so that was the 1970s wave of socialism. Then again, it became, in retrospect, not real socialism was never real socialism. Then in the 80s, it was Nicaragua, where lots of the Sandinista regime that was widely admired by a lot of Western intellectuals and, well, the same guy who was the president or whatever the example title is of Nicaragua then Daniel Ortega is now president again. And, well, I mean, the country is a basket case. But you won’t hear Western intellectuals talk about it. They will just say, well, it’s not merely socialism. And Venezuela was perhaps the latest wave where you had in the early 2000s, Hugo Chavez being a rock star among Western intellectuals and political activists, and then when their economy collapsed, again, not real socialism. Next time will be different.

Sean Rasmussen [00:23:23]:
Yeah, I remember growing up, there was all these people wearing Che Guevara T shirts everywhere.

Kristian Niemietz [00:23:28]:
Yeah, that has, as is often the case with these hipster fashion statements that once it’s too widely adopted, it becomes a bit cringe. So hipster is about distinction. So everyone has a Che Guevara shirt. Maybe you don’t want to have one unless you can somehow prove that you were already into it because before it was cool.

Sean Rasmussen [00:23:49]:
It’s like rock bands.

Kristian Niemietz [00:23:51]:
That’s your guess.

Sean Rasmussen [00:23:55]:
So you talked about quite a few instances where these places didn’t really work out so well. And you introduced the concept of the socialist cycle. Can you explain about what the socialist cycle is and how that plays out in the historical cases?

Kristian Niemietz [00:24:12]:
Yeah. So that is just these three stages that Western intellectuals go through with regard to every socialist regime. First, admiration, enthusiasm, then backtracking, and then finally claiming that it was never socialist. So you always get these three stages.

Sean Rasmussen [00:24:29]:
Okay, okay.

Kristian Niemietz [00:24:31]:
Sometimes it’s even the same people. So in the case of Noam Chomsky, again, he was also one of the early admirers of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. He even, I think, traveled there at some point, must have been in the mid 2000s, and was full of hope, saying, this is great. You’re building a better world here. And then later he said, oh, no, I never said Venezuela is socialist. What are you talking about? So in some cases, it’s even the same person at different stages having apparently completely different attitudes towards a particular socialist model. More often it’s simply that, say, a new generation grows up and they don’t really know what the previous generation of socialists were up to. So they just say, well, let’s forget about all that. That wasn’t socialism, so we’ll do things differently.

Sean Rasmussen [00:25:24]:
Okay. And when you released the book, did you ever hear back from socialists who kind of like, did they have criticisms of you around this position that you can remember?

Kristian Niemietz [00:25:35]:
Very little. I mean, that’s the problem. I would have hoped that it gives at least some socialists some second thoughts, but. So I was hoping that this would. That I would reach out beyond the circle of the usual suspects. I don’t just want to reach people who are already committed free marketeers, which specifically, that’s why I try to make clear, for the purposes of this book, you don’t need to be a free marketeer, really. This isn’t a pro free market book. So I’m obviously a pro free marketer kind of guy. But in this book specifically, I’m not trying to convert people to the economics of Milton Friedman and to free market libertarianism specifically. So I’d say you can be a social Democrat, somebody who maybe wants a much larger state than I would want to, a more extensive welfare state than I would want to, and still agree with that book. And in fact, there was one review that I remember that was from somebody who I would describe as a, a Social Democrat. And he did say, well, Nimitz and I were obviously not on the same wavelength, but on this he’s right. So that happened to some extent.

Sean Rasmussen [00:26:51]:
Okay, okay.

Kristian Niemietz [00:26:52]:
But actual socialists, I think they just boycotted it or slanked it off without reading it. But that is because, so I mean from their own perspective. So this came out at the height of the socialist fashion. So if you imagine you are part of this movement and that is just the hit and cool thing to do. Now if you read a book that tells you you are totally wrong about this, well, the problem then becomes it’s not just so if you accept these ideas, or even a large part of it, you wouldn’t just have to accept that you are wrong about something. And that’s difficult enough. You would also have to basically fall out with a movement and with a vibe and with something that is part of your identity, of your social image. And now imagine turning up at some. Imagine you’re part of some organization where people talk about socialism. So there were various conferences and some of them are still happening here. Socialism isn’t just an abstract set of ideas. It is also a social movement where people come together and form communities around this. And imagine turning up to a meeting like that and saying, well, I’ve read this book and I’m no longer sure whether I’m really a socialist. Well, I mean, tough luck with that. You’re going to get canceled immediately. At the very least, you will lose a lot of reputation.

Sean Rasmussen [00:28:28]:
If you’re answering socialists who say that that wasn’t real socialism, the response is, okay, well there’s obviously the track record, but is there something also fundamentally too about just the nature of human relationships and societies that make these types of top down solutions untenable?

Kristian Niemietz [00:28:50]:
Yes, that definitely is. And that is why the failures of socialism were predicted by their critics. And this long before they had failed so many times. In fact, long before they had really failed anywhere. So there was, for example, there was in the 1920s and 30s already there was what was called the socialist calculation debate, that was a fairly academic discussion among economists about things that may Seem a bit technical to a non economist, but where the idea was simply that without markets you’re not going to have if the means of production, the input factors, if they are not traded on markets, if I can’t buy things from you, buy things from me. We don’t know how much things are worth because prices tell us a lot about to what extent something is in demand, to what extent it’s in supply, how much there is of it and in particular times and places. Indeed these are things that change all the time. And if you have an economy without price signals, you just lose all that information. And therefore the argument of the anti socialist economies in the 20s and 30s was the that a socialist economy, an economy that has no market prices is going to be chaotic and inefficient. And that is a big part of what later turned out to be correct. So socialist economies never came up with a way of substituting of replacing market prices with something equivalent. That’s why you had this constant pattern of overproduction on the one hand and underproduction on the other hand and in practice much more underproduction, conservative shortages. But these were theoretical debates that people already had and before there were many examples of socialist economy. So there was really just one example at the time, which was the Soviet Union. And in the early stages of the socialist calculation debate there was not even that. So there was. The Russian revolution had happened, but they hadn’t yet rolled out their five year plans, they hadn’t yet collectivized everything. So this was initially purely a theoretical debate. But the liberal critics of socialism they already saw, saw these problems coming and.

Sean Rasmussen [00:31:12]:
It kind of revealed itself too, even in the societies themselves where they implemented this, like these rising black markets and things like that, sort of like natural markets that emerged to solve the problems that the centralized planning economy couldn’t solve.

Kristian Niemietz [00:31:27]:
Yes. And that was all predicted, all by people who said look, it doesn’t matter how exactly you do it, this is a fundamental issue. And so even the question of whether that society is going to be dictatorial or democratic, irrelevant. So one of the earliest contributions to the socialist calculation debate may even have been the paper that started it, where the economist who wrote this, Ludwig Vormeises, Austrian economist, he said for our purposes it’s completely irrelevant whether the socialist planning board, whether that is a dictatorial institution that is just appointed by somebody with absolute power or whether that’s democratically elected, said I’m not interested in that, I’m talking about purely the economics. So he said he was completely uninterested in the details because he showed this is about fundamentals. It doesn’t matter how you do it, it will always end up in the same way.

Sean Rasmussen [00:32:23]:
Yeah. And that’s sort of like the knowledge problem, right, that Hayek and the Austrian school identified.

Kristian Niemietz [00:32:29]:
Yes. So Hayek Leiter then refined that argument. He talked about how we need a competitive process of trial and error, because that’s what a market economy basically is. You have lots of businesses which are built on different business ideas. So different people have very different ideas of how an organization should be run, what that organization should produce and how. And they put all these ideas into practice, they test them in the marketplace. Some succeed, some fail. And this is something that we then work out over time what works and what doesn’t. This is something that we wouldn’t know in advance. We just have to try lots of different things. So that’s part of the Hayekian argument, competition as a discovery process, as he called it. And he also said that a lot of economically relevant facts, the sort of things that a planner would have to know, a socialist planner, somebody who, who drafts five year plans for a socialist planning board. A lot of economically relevant knowledge is the kind of knowledge that we can’t really express easily in words. So if you think about, say, your own job, if you had to train a successor, say, or you take a year break and somebody has to replace you for a year, there are things that you could tell that person, you could tell them something about the recording techniques or whatever, but most of it, probably at least a large chunk of it, are things that you know how to do because you’ve been doing it millions of times, but you couldn’t easily explain it. It’s like riding a bike or say, the grammar of your own native language where you know how to do it, but you couldn’t easily express that knowledge. And Hayek said a lot of economic knowledge is like that. We can’t express it, we just act upon it. In a market economy, that’s good enough. You just need to act upon it. You don’t need to know why you do what you do. But in a planned economy, you would have to somehow try to make all that knowledge explicit.

Sean Rasmussen [00:34:39]:
And almost all these places where socialism has been tried, there seems to be a direct correlation between, okay, so you have these socialist experiments and then you have kind of repressive government regimes. And then the flip side of that is like liberal Western democracies that have a lot of free market going on and a lot more freedom for individuals to express themselves to do what they want to do with their lives. There seems to be a pretty stark contrast there. Is there something about the socialist experiment that leads to authoritarian types of, of government structures?

Kristian Niemietz [00:35:20]:
Yes, there definitely is. And that was also one of Hayek’s arguments already in the 1940s and others said this before, that in a socialist economy, the state is the main economic player, really. It’s the sole supplier or the main supplier of most goods and services. It’s the main employer, the main landlord. So you work for the state, you rent your house or flat from the state. If you want a loan, you get that from a state state bank, you get your groceries from the state. So your entire life revolves around the state. The state controls everything or nearly all of economic life. And that is just difficult to combine or impossible to combine with personal autonomy. If the Canadian government had a monopoly on podcasts and shows and say you’d have to apply for permission before you can rent headphones and microphones and recording devices, there would just be a temptation. Say, even if this was a relatively liberal minded government, there would just be a temptation to not give those means of communication to a dissident, somebody that they don’t like. Whereas in a market economy you don’t need to ask someone for permission, you can just set up your own thing and see whether people like it or not. And that’s just a problem that in socialist economies you always have this massive concentration of power and where socialists would always say, well, but isn’t that what capitalists have in a capitalist economy? To which the answer is no, because different capitalists compete with each other. They don’t all collaborate with each other. That’s Marxist mythology, that they’re somehow all part of a class and see themselves as such and that they all collaborate and work together to keep others oppressed. No, different capitalists compete with each other. And if you don’t like what one of them is offering, if you don’t like working for one of them, well, maybe you have other options that there are always other options in a market economy.

Sean Rasmussen [00:37:29]:
And in some market economies that gets a little corrupted with crony capitalism, which kind of opens the door for like the appeal of something like socialism, right? Like if you have monopoly and, and corruption in, in between governments and big corporations and stuff like that.

Kristian Niemietz [00:37:46]:
Yes, sure. Although there with the, the criticism of crony capitalism, I don’t want to go too far in that direction because there we have. So at the moment more purist end of the libertarian spectrum, it starts to sound almost a bit like real socialism has never been tried where they would say, well, but capitalism has never been tried. I’d say even with the imperfections that we have and even with the amount of cronyism, capitalism is still at least pretty good.

Sean Rasmussen [00:38:16]:
At least multiples factors, times better.

Kristian Niemietz [00:38:19]:
Absolutely, yes.

Sean Rasmussen [00:38:22]:
Is there something but a tension between like, I’m really big into individual freedom and liberty and stuff like that? Kind of a classical liberal, I guess. And so I’m always concerned about governments that, that want to kind of go down in collectivist roots. So, you know, like a lot of the identitarian politics right now is like let’s, let’s sort of, you know, address group, group differences and squish down individual rights based on, on somehow these inequalities that are happening between different identities, for example. But I guess you could use the class thing too. But there seems to be a tension because as a socialist you kind of want to even out people’s outcomes. And in order to do that you have to. It seems like there’s a fundamental tension there between individual rights and freedoms and the government trying to get that money from you so they can give it to someone else or, or something like that.

Kristian Niemietz [00:39:19]:
If you have individual freedom, then you will have unequal outcomes. So outcomes will then because different individuals will make very different choices. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It could just mean, say people have different preferences, make different career choices, and some will do better economically than others, maybe others will do better in some other way. And you will have these differences both between individuals and between groups as well. Because it would be an amazing coincidence if every demographic group is represented in every institution. So of course you’re going to have differences in outcomes where if you’re a liberal, a classical liberal, you will not see that as a problem, or at least not insofar as it is really just the result of different people making different choices. Whereas on the progressive left, and that’s where why this overlaps so much with socialism, they will always have a suspicion that somehow there is some hidden invisible power structure where in some way the game is rigged against particular groups. And even when they can’t say what exactly that is and can’t pinpoint to anything specific that’s supposedly holding back, they will just assert that that is the case. And that’s why we see that the woke progressivism that we’ve seen, especially in the early part of this decade, say 2020, 21, 22, that is often at first sight it looks as if this has nothing to do with economics. It’s more about say what words you use is this word offensive, prejudice, all that. Yes, of course. And about unconscious bias training and all that. That. But even there. So the more committed activists in the main, they’re also socialists. So there was the group Black Lives Matter. BLM’s they did say on one of their websites, or certainly at least the British offshoot, they did say we are all anti capitalists. So that not just a group against police brutality or so if it was just that, then I don’t think anyone would have a problem with it. Clearly they were pretty much right from the start also an anti capitalist group and in practice woke progressivism and socialism just overlap massively. And that’s why you can find books like there was one from a New York University professor, I think it was called what is anti Racism? And the subtitle then says and why it means Anti Capitalism. So we’re already giving the answer. So merger. That’s what happens nowadays, that all the fashionable ideologies always go hand in hand. It’s not possible to say, well I believe in this one fashionable ideology, but there and in a different area, I’m on the unfashionable side. No, they always have to come as a package deal.

Sean Rasmussen [00:42:17]:
I know. I really wanted to talk to you about this because the emergence and popularity of DEI in Canada, like Canada is pretty into DEI at the moment and there’s not a lot of pushback yet from the people yet when I look at the sort of the E in dei, the equity part of part that seems to be like, it seems to be socialism as far as I can tell. What’s your take on that?

Kristian Niemietz [00:42:47]:
Well, it doesn’t need to be full on socialism, but it would just be. It’s just not really compatible with a free society in which people can make different choices and that will lead to different outcomes. So there was long before this became such a big deal. One of my colleagues wrote a book on this, specifically on the gender pay gap, where he said, yes, okay, it’s true on average that men earn more than women. But he then looked at various other factors that could explain that. So confounding factors other than the fashionable explanation that this must be because of sexism and that we live in a patriarchal society. And he started with something quite simple, which was simply surveys among students where they were asked what are you looking for in your future job? And on average, men were much more likely to respond to on pay. They cared about making money. And women were more likely to say they care about whether it is a meaningful job, a fulfilling job. So non financial benefits. And I’m not saying that there’s wrong with either of anything wrong with either of those choices, but if people will act upon them, then you will see some differences in aggregate outcomes. It could then well be that there will be agenda, a gap in the opposite direction. If you ask about job satisfaction, maybe that if women are on average again more likely to prioritize other factors, that they see a job as meaningful and fulfilling, they’ll probably be on average happier, whereas men will on average earn more. But it’s just that to the extent where men and women have the same preferences, they also achieve the same outcome one once for that the gap disappears. But when people have different preferences make different choices on the basis of that, you’re not going to get equality.

Sean Rasmussen [00:44:40]:
I guess the critics of capitalism or the critics of Western civilization generally speaking are constantly using these Marxist, neo Marxist tools to sort of poke at these differences in outcomes and to explain them by nefarious reasons.

Kristian Niemietz [00:44:58]:
Reasons. Well, sure they would say that what I’m doing now is just, well, I’m denying that there is patriarchal oppression and I’m just doing this because I’m a member of the patriarchy myself. That would be the explanation that confounding factors distorting other factors that might explain differences in group outcomes are just dismissed. And you just have to start from, from the presumption that if some group is doing worse than others in some respect, it must be because they are oppressed, because there is some structural force that’s oppressing them. Whereas for me as a liberal, I wouldn’t immediately rule out that possibility. It’s just that I’d say, well, I’m not going to assume that unless I have strong evidence for correction.

Sean Rasmussen [00:45:50]:
Strong claims require strong evidence. Those ideas, like what you’re just expressing now is very popular in Canada right now. I mean I would say like in most of education and in a lot of the bureaucracy in the government, they hold those views about these issues. I mean that’s kind of why I started up Viewpoints in the first place, because I really wanted to offer alternative takes on some of these issues that just aren’t getting covered in mainstream media or in an academic.

Kristian Niemietz [00:46:19]:
Yeah, that’s, that’s pretty much the same here, although we may be past the peak already. So there has been, I think a decline in. So certainly in private companies. Three years ago that they were all, well, not all, but a large chunk of them were offering courses on unconscious bias training and basically lecturing their employees on how about their there restivism and so forth and then that is declining. So there it was probably, well, unsurprisingly it was never really strongly felt. It was more a feeling that well this is the vibe now. These are the times we live in and we better get with the times otherwise we will be the baddies. But of course does persist in the public sector where they don’t have to look at the bottom line because well, there’s no bottom line. They’re not selling products they won’t rebuild.

Sean Rasmussen [00:47:13]:
Is one of the questions I wanted to ask you was about the Canadian context. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with what’s going on in Canada, but no, not very, not really. Okay. I mean I think it’s similar to UK in a lot of ways. In Canada, you know, our government has grown by like in the last 10 years 40% the number of employees in government and the size of government is, you know, relative to GDP has grown immensely. Spending has grown a ton in the last 10 years and also at the same time they’ve adopted a lot of these sort of Marxist inspired critical social justice things and made them policy and government and even in some rulings in the courts as well. Can you creep into socialism by accident? Can Canada sort of like creep into it? I know that some people talk about Argentina as having done that, that kind of move going from like a really prosperous country to like a death by a thousand cuts in terms of policy choices.

Kristian Niemietz [00:48:15]:
Yeah, I don’t think it will happen in that way. So a lot of what happens there, especially in the when, when it comes to institutionalized progressivism is really just a kind of group thing where people go along with the current fashion and you don’t want to be the, the bad guy, the one who speaks out, the one who says well I’m not going to take part in the unconscious bias training because I think it’s a lot of mumbo jumbo, then you will be the baddie. So a lot of this can just happen as a result of groupthink and peer pressure and can also, once that becomes weaker, can dissipate again. So in that way you’re not going to sleepwalk into full on socialism. So you will get a less productive economy and a more divided society. Because what has been shown, there was a survey here on this among people who took part in these diversity training, the sort of semi voluntary where you didn’t technically have to, but it was strong group pressure to take part in it. And they asked people later and say people with center right opinions were more likely to say afterwards, well, they’re now more concerned about saying what they truly think. And maybe that’s what was the purpose all along, to make some people expressing political opinions. So there what you really get is just a more divided society. And that’s bad in its own way, even if it doesn’t have economic implications.

Sean Rasmussen [00:49:48]:
But it’s different because it’s not like a structural thing like you’re talking about with centralized ownership and planning.

Kristian Niemietz [00:49:54]:
Yes, exactly. So you could say maybe California is in some ways the world worst part of the world when it comes to that, where there’s kind of progressive madness, a lot of it originates and they are standard setters, trendsetters, but they are also still, that has to be admitted, a very rich economy. So if they seceded from the United States, they would be still one of the biggest economies in the world. And in per capita terms they already are. So you can have, have all sorts of silly ideas and still be a prosperous economy. I mean ideally I’d want a prosperous economy and also good ideas in the social sphere and without excessive valkyrie and whatnot. But I wouldn’t say that will turn a country into Argentina.

Sean Rasmussen [00:50:49]:
Okay, and what is the Argentinian, what’s your understanding of that process? Process?

Kristian Niemietz [00:50:55]:
Oh well, I mean there they just had this backlash against after the global economic crisis of the 1930s, they just adopted a populist protectionist economic model and never really recovered from that again. But it did take conscious choices. So abandoning an economic system, an economic tradition that they had, and adopting a very different one instead based on price controls, tariffs, state led industrial policy, the government becoming a main actor in economic life. So not necessarily in a socialist way. So it’s not that they had central planning or anything, there’s no five year plans in Argentina, but just the state occupying commanding heights of the economy. And yes, that led to several generations of near economic stagnation in relative safety climate from being one of the richest countries in the world to well, basically just a middle income economy now.

Sean Rasmussen [00:52:04]:
Like when you hear Javier Milei talk about it, he’s always like socialism. He describes the Argentinian experiment with those policies as kind of socialist.

Kristian Niemietz [00:52:16]:
Yeah, I’d say Javert Miller is great. Of course I wish him luck and he’s great at explaining economic concepts in a way I’ve never heard this before from a politician. So great. But if that’s what he does, if he describes Argentina as socialist there, I wouldn’t quite go along with it. I’m sure that they have social media, socialist tendencies, socialist leanings, but there was still a difference between that and Venezuela. Although for a while they had his indirect predecessor, Cristina Kirchner was also implementing price controls in a variety of sectors and there it did start to look quite Venezuela like. So maybe that was the period he was talking about.

Sean Rasmussen [00:53:05]:
Okay, there’s a news item that happened just yesterday which was the New York Democratic mayoral candidate, I don’t know if you heard about this, is a self proclaimed socialist. Yes, and I guess there’s a few other ones too. Can you think of any sort of notable public socialists like that? I guess there’s aoc, Bernie Sanders.

Kristian Niemietz [00:53:30]:
Yes, Bernie Sanders hasn’t gone away. Okay, compared to five years ago. @ least now we know he’s not going to be president, but he is still around as a public figure. So I guess that’s what’s changed since the time that the book came out. So there you still had active political electoral projects of say the idea at the time was here in Britain to make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister and he was a full on socialist and it looked quite realistic for a while. And okay, now he is still around, he’s still a big figure on social media and has his cult following following. But okay, he’s not going to be prime minister. Whereas when it comes to a place like New York, well, I’d say I don’t know how much power the mayor of New York really has, but either way and how their political system operates, I’m guessing he will be constrained if he becomes mayor. Gleb seems realistic from what I’ve read, assuming that he becomes mayor, he would still be constrained by other factions within his party. So the Democratic Party generally is not a socialist party. It’s just that they have this socialist wing which he represents and he and AOC and Bernie Sanders and others. So there’s that. I mean New York, even though it’s a big city nonetheless is a city. He’s not going to be able to turn New York into a socialist people’s republic. He’s not going to have that power nonetheless. What it will mean is firstly he will have a much bigger platform and will be able to give socialist ideas opposed Bush and there is already a youth movement around him. So this gives socialists much greater visibility and confidence and they have this feeling now that we’re back and we’re getting somewhere. So in that way he can lead to a socialist revival even if he cannot turn New York literally into a socialist republic. But even from the socialist proposals that he can implement and that’s bad enough. He’s talking about rent controls and state owned grocery stores. Okay, that’s yes, very small scale socialism. They’re not going to have starvation, but it’s bad enough. So I mean rent controls, that’s really the sort of anti economics. Even very left wing economists like Paul Krugman will tell you that rent controls are a terrible idea. So this isn’t something that’s specific to libertarians. Paul Krugman wrote this article for I can’t remember where but a few. It must have been around in the early 2000s or so where he talked about rent controls in San Francisco and talked about what a terrible idea that was and it’s just very obvious. We released a paper on this a few months ago where somebody just reviewed the literature, the economic studies on rent controls and it is quite amazing. He found about 200 different papers from the first ones I think from the 1960s, the latest ones from just a year or two ago. And wherever you look at it, wherever rent controls are implemented, the details differ but the result is always the same. It’s almost like with socialism again where you can say well the result is always the same but the proponents will always say oh, it will be different next time. Real rent controls have never been tried but the result is that you get shortages of residential properties, you get less investment in the housing sector and you get a misallocation where some people, beneficiaries will live in much larger properties than they need to because they think hooray, it’s cheaper now, whereas other people just can’t get into the rental market.

Sean Rasmussen [00:57:17]:
So I’m getting from the sense of what you’re talking about with where socialism at these days is that it’s not really a political threat anywhere, is it? Is it maybe in some of the European countries?

Kristian Niemietz [00:57:28]:
Well there was, I mean Spain had Podemos, the Socialist Party. They were doing extremely well in the. They came from nowhere and suddenly about 10 years ago, suddenly they were a major party and the same in Greece in their case. This was clearly a response to the Eurozone crisis. So fairly specific conditions, but nonetheless then Syriza became a major political party and both in Spain and Greece they became part of the government. But it ultimately didn’t go very far. So you then had. Well they just had what always happens that their supporters said well you’re not real socialists, you’re traitors and lost confidence in the project. And also to the extent that socialism is just a form of hipsterism. So I think that’s 80% of it at least. Hipsters are just novelty seekers that they, they don’t stick to a project for very long. So after a while, once you have socialists, once you have socialist participation in a government, they will just move on to the next exciting thing and they will just lose interest in the last one. So yes, I’m not saying that the Western world is going to go full on Marxist, Leninist tomorrow or next year here. That’s not so much the threat, it’s just when you have these people, even if they cannot impose their economic plan in full, it’s still bad enough that places like Spain and Greece, what they actually need is free market reforms. Spain has this problem with mass unemployment which they’ve had for ages and made worse by the Eurozone crisis. What they need is massive liberalization in some sectors. And you’re not going to have that when you have socialists who are so culturally dominant that they crowd out sensible proposals. And that’s what happens in places like that. Even if they can’t create a socialist people’s republic, so they’re not going to have gulags and starvation, but it still means they’re not sorting out the problems that they have.

Sean Rasmussen [00:59:47]:
So even in countries that. So there’s maybe not a risk of full takeover, but there’s by having like an elite class of people in there who are sympathetic to these ideas, it kind of creates friction in the market and sort of decreases prosperity.

Kristian Niemietz [01:00:04]:
Yes, yes, definitely. So I mean we see this here that you had. So the Labour Party is mostly a party for young voters. That’s their electoral base. And young voters here are quite rightly frustrated or about things like the housing situation. Housing is unaffordable. In Britain, the ratio of house prices to incomes has shot up massively. And that’s because we’re not building anything every time in Canada. Yeah, well, yeah, the Anglosphere is generally quite bad on those measures on housing supply. Every time somebody wants to build something, you have NIMBY boomers protesting against it and they hijack the political process. Ideally, what should have happened, happened. Either labor or some other organization that appeals to young people should have built up a counterweight to NIMBYism, which is now on a very small scale happening with what’s called yimbyism, the yes in my backyard movement, basically a pro development movement. And I’m glad that’s happening, but it’s just, it’s too little too late. We could have had this 10 years ago, but instead the young people here spent five years singing old Jeremy Corbyn well, okay, you probably didn’t follow us. They had a chant, Irish, basically just his name and chanting this at festivals and so on. And okay, even if they didn’t turn the country into North Korea, they didn’t create the North Korea of the North Sea, but it did mean more productive solutions were just crowded out. And speaking as someone who was talking about housing supply and issues like that throughout that period and before even, it just meant you wouldn’t get a hearing because you have to explain why centralized planning is a bad idea. We have to explain the very basics, the Econ 101 when we’re talking about how to address the real issues that the Western world has.

Sean Rasmussen [01:02:08]:
I’ve been struggling with that in Canada, in the Canadian context. I’ve been trying to learn more myself about the economic side of things so I can be knowledgeable voter myself and understand some of the underlying processes. But it does seem that people don’t really. Most voters don’t really think about these things in any way beyond like, oh, I want free daycare or I want rent control or something. They see them on a policy by policy basis, but they don’t understand the underlying principles and how those crimes create or prevent prosperity.

Kristian Niemietz [01:02:42]:
Yes, and I guess in an ideal world you wouldn’t really have to. I mean, not everybody has to have a degree in economics. It’s perfectly okay to say, well, this isn’t my area, I don’t know much about that. That’s how I approach most issues. I would just say, well, I don’t know enough about it. So therefore I don’t have strong opinions on it. But what I’d like to see, and this was briefly true, I guess in the 80s and 90s that you had among opinion formers, you had people who had a good enough grasp of how market economies work and they were able to therefore steer the conversation in a productive direction where they would have been able to say, well, no rent controls, they clearly don’t work, they create shortages. And then you don’t need to know all the details about this. It’s not necessary to read all the 200 studies on this, but you can get the gist of it. And you will hear these arguments if they are enough opinion formers who do. Who give you that in a distilled. Who give you the distilled version of IT, which is 200 studies been tried all around the world. It’s the same result. And that’s it really, that’s not complex. You don’t need a PhD in economics for that.

Sean Rasmussen [01:03:55]:
Yeah. And I think Javier Millet’s movement did a pretty good job of communicating to young people about these problems, right?

Kristian Niemietz [01:04:01]:
Yes, exactly. That’s what’s so great about his video. So you can, I guess it helps, helps that he was an economics professor before, so he knows the material. But most of the time economists are just terrible at explaining this in an intuitive way and quite often they just also don’t want to do it. So you have economists who say, write papers showing that when controls are terrible, but then they don’t enter the national policy debate, really, they publish the paper and then they go home and leave it there, when what they should do is go on social media and if you have of a politician like this New York candidate or a socialist publication like Jacobin, if they make the case for rent controls, why aren’t there more economists say, quote, tweeting them saying no, total rubbish and link to the paper and have a look at it. So there is. This does happen sometimes, but it’s just I could name maybe five people, five economists who do that.

Sean Rasmussen [01:05:03]:
Is there a competence issue? Like if you look at the people who are running the managerial elite in western countries, who are running the show in terms of the bureaucrats, to some extent the academics as well, but this whole cadre of people who seem to have very little awareness of economic principles, but who are in charge of these files, these portfolios. Do you see a problem with that or am I being too, I don’t know, populist?

Kristian Niemietz [01:05:37]:
I don’t know, it’s hard to say. It could well be that if you had. So I guess this is the argument that Brian Kaplan would make American Economist, who talked about what he calls the myth of the rational voter. He shows that across the range of issues, the general public is quite anti economics. Essentially. I believe in a lot of populist policies and where what others would dismiss as technocratic elites are actually more pro markets. Not by no means libertarians, but at least they get the basics of supply and demand. So I guess it differs from area to area. But I wouldn’t say that the economic status is just forced upon us by elites. So what we do see in opinion surveys is that measured like rent controls are usually popular. So it’s always tempting to say, well, just the political elite, it’s the bureaucratic elite, but we the people, we’re so great. Well, sometimes we have to admit that quite often terrible policies are quite popular.

Sean Rasmussen [01:06:49]:
I can only speak from the Canadian context, but in the Canadian context I’d say since the early 70s education, like the people who are employed in education K to 12 education, like the kids education and even in universities. Now if you look at the political makeup of people in those institutions, it’s maybe 95% left leaning and maybe even more than that, I don’t know. There’s no political viewpoint diversity in those institutions anymore.

Kristian Niemietz [01:07:19]:
Yes.

Sean Rasmussen [01:07:19]:
So in that respect, is it the education system that’s failing us?

Kristian Niemietz [01:07:24]:
Yes. So that left wing dominance that clearly exists. I’ve seen surveys on this too where you just look at, you go by self identification, you ask academics, where do you see yourself on the political spectrum? And you see a fairly clear pattern that say in the 1960s it was already left leaning, but still it was maybe two to one or three to one or so among those who had an opinion, had three right winger, three, one right winger for every three left wingers or so to sort of, okay, that I could live with. I don’t necessarily need to be in the majority all the time, but being at least not being the only one would be quite nice. And then it’s just become that that ratio has over time shifted to more and more left wingers and to the extent that in some departments in some disciplines it’s basically down no self identified right wingers at all anymore. So in the humanities in particular, it’s far more likely that somebody will openly say, well I’m a Marxist and that is the mainstream thinking. So that’s bad for academia itself because it means you get groupthink and some issues will just not get talked about. But to what extent that spills over into wider society? That’s a bit trickier there. I’ve seen conflict, conflicting evidence.

Sean Rasmussen [01:08:55]:
Really. Okay, I’m surprised by that because I feel like that’s a pretty direct line. I mean like, it’s like, you know the joke about you send your kid off to college and they come back with blue hair and whatever and they do, but. And they don’t know what sex they are anymore and stuff like that.

Kristian Niemietz [01:09:08]:
Well, but to what extent is that because of something that their Marxist professor tells them? And to what extent is this just because they’re among lots of other young.

Sean Rasmussen [01:09:16]:
People and a pure effect? Yeah.

Kristian Niemietz [01:09:18]:
Yes, it could be much more that than what they pick up from the professional process.

Sean Rasmussen [01:09:22]:
Interesting. But, but it is kind of curious though that all the professors are very, very left leaning as well though. Like if, if it, you know, it does, it’s not like it’s, it’s not causation, but there is a pretty high correlation there.

Kristian Niemietz [01:09:36]:
Yeah. I guess it can become a spiral that that you would just not go into academia. If you already know, if you already notice at the undergraduate level. Okay, I’m not going to. I’m never going to fit in here. I’ll always be the bad guy. Then you rather do something else maybe and then becomes self reinforcing.

Sean Rasmussen [01:09:54]:
If people want to find out more about you and your work and the work of your organization, where can they go?

Kristian Niemietz [01:10:00]:
I would just tell them to visit the website of the Institute of Economic affairs and have a look at whatever publications they are interested in. So you can definitely you can get Socialism the Failed Idea that Never Dies. That’s all available for download. I’ve written several follow up publications since then, so mostly smaller ones. Doesn’t always have to be a full blown book. But we have our substack blog so there’s plenty of material if someone’s interested in that.

Sean Rasmussen [01:10:30]:
Great. I’ll put links in the show notes for all those things. And thanks again for coming on the show. I learned a lot. Super interesting. 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 seanviewpointspodc Cast Catch.