On January 23rd, I got an email from somebody who claimed you're not going to believe this video you're about to see.
And we all get a lot of these things, YouTube's right, big waste of time.
Well, I clicked on it and I received the shock of my life.
I proceeded to watch a video of Keynes and Hayek involved in a rap on the business cycle theory in which Hayek clearly won the debate.
and it took a while for me to process what I had just seen. I sort of fell on the floor,
the jaw dropped. We've all been through this when we saw this. We couldn't believe it was
happening. You know, it occurred to me immediately that this is the greatest piece of educational
material probably in the history of the Austrian School, you know, over 500 years. But not
only that, the video does more than that to my mind. It also educates about economics
Economics in general and makes economics very interesting, very exciting. I'm sure it's
going to be recruiting people into economics programs all over the country now. They're
going to be showing up to their departments expecting to learn about things like structure
production and Hayek and all these things and they're going to find out otherwise.
But it's not only an important piece of educational tool for the average person. We have many
students who have given the video to their professors who found out that there's a person
for the first time, you know, ever. So that's been very important. On Mises Institute forums, by the way, the video itself has become legendary in the meantime. Things like, prepare to get schooled in my Austrian perspective, you know, on people's signatures. Over the next few weeks, after January 23rd, I must have had a thousand copies sent to me. Have you seen this? Three weeks later, are you kidding? Of course I've seen this thing. This is the most legendary thing. I wrote Russ Roberts, whose name
is on the video in addition to the gentleman we have here tonight and he said, well, you're
very gracious for saying how much you like the video, but I must tell you that it's John
Poppola who is the real genius behind the thing. He's the one who really understands
the business cycle, better business cycle theory, better than I do and he's also the
genius behind producing the video. So in some ways for me this moment of the conference
represents two dreams that I never thought I would see fulfilled. One was watching such
The second thing is having John Papula here with us at the conference, it was hastily arranged, he was very gracious to come here, and I won't use any more time, I'll just introduce the man who is a superstar to all of us, John Papula.
Okay. I haven't done anything like this very much, so to get introduced like that really
makes it that much easier. Thank you, Jeff. It's like at first, you know, Carolyn gives
her an amazing speech and she's an eloquent speaker and has such a grasp of her knowledge
And now, now this, so, excuse me. Hopefully the acoustics are good because the lyrics,
if you haven't seen it, are dense and if you have, they're still dense. So, what I've put
together is, as best I can and as, hopefully, a good amount of time, sort of a narrative
of how this came about, how I came to even know about these things. I didn't take economics.
I didn't know about these ideas even three years ago.
So how I went from that to having, you know, standing here today.
And that's what you're about to see.
So without further ado, let me lower the lights, hopefully not blow out your eardrums, and
present fear, the boom, and bust.
Okay.
I am the agenda.
Tell them I've arrived.
And then tell them I've arrived.
How's that?
Tell them I've arrived.
And then tell them I've arrived.
How's that?
And the name is...
Hayek.
F.A. Hayek.
Good name.
Freddy, Keynes, hey listen, party at the Fed, 20 minutes, lobby, John Maynard Keynes, F.A. Hayek
Yeah, we're opposed, we oppose each other philosophically, in the same studio
We've been going back and forth for a century, I want to steer markets, I want them set free
There's a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it, claim what went wrong, it's the animal spirit
John Maynard Keynes wrote the book on modern macro, the man you need when the economy's off track
Depression, recession, now your question's in session, have a seat and I'll school you in one simple lesson
In 1929, the big crash, we didn't bounce back, economy's in the trash
Persistent unemployment, the result of sticky wages, waiting for recovery, that's outrageous
At a real plan, any fool can understand the advice real simple, whose aggregate demand, CIG, all together gets to Y, keep that total growing, watch the economy fly
We've been going back and forth for a century, I want to steer markets, I want them set free, there's a boom and bust cycle, and good reason to fear it, claim all interest rates
Nah, it's the animal spirit, you see it's all about spending, hear the register cha-ching, circular flow, the dough is everything
So if that flow is getting low, doesn't matter the reason We need more government spending, now it's stimulus season
So forget about saving, get it straight out of your head Like I said in the long run, we're all dead
Savings is destruction, that's the paradox of thrift Don't keep money in your pocket or that growth will never live
Because business is driven by the animal spirits The bull and the bear, and there's reasons to fear
It's effects on capital, investment, income and growth That's why the state should build a gap with stimulus
Both the monetary and the fiscal, they're equally correct, public works dig in ditches, war has the same effect, even a broken window helps the glass man, have some wealth to multiply or drive and hire the economy's health.
And if the central bank's interest rate policy tanks, a liquidity trap, that new money's stuck in the banks, deficits could be the cure you've been looking for, let the spending soar, now that you know the score, my general theory's made quite an impression.
Revolution
I transformed the econ profession, you know me, modesty, still I'm taking a bow, so say
it loud and say it proud, we're all Keynesians now
We've been going back and forth for a century, I want to steer markets, I want them set free
There's a booming bus cycle and good reason to fear it
I've made my case, Freddy H, listen up, can you hear it?
I'll begin in broad strokes, just like my friend Keynes
His theory conceals the mechanics of change That simple equation, too much aggregation
ignores human action and motivation, yet it continues as a justification, for bailouts, payoffs, by polls with machinations,
you provide them with cover to sell us a free lunch, then all that we're left with is debt and a bunch,
if you're living high on that cheap credit hog, don't look for a cure from the hair of the dog,
real savings come first if you want to invest, the market coordinates time with interest,
Your focus on spending is pushing on thread In the long run, my friend, it's your theory that's dead
So sorry there, buddy, if that sounds like invective Prepare to get schooled in my Austrian perspective
We've been going back and forth for a century I want to steer markets, I want them set free
There's a booming bus cycle and good reason to fear it Play more winter breaks, nah, it's the animal spirit
The place you should study isn't the bust It's the boom that should make you feel leery
That's the thrust of my theory. The capital structure is key. Malinvestments wreck the economy.
The boom gets started with an expansion of credit. The Fed sets rates low. Are you starting to get it?
That new money is confused for real, loanable funds. But it's just inflation that's driving the ones
who invest in new projects like housing construction. The boom plants the seeds for its future destruction.
The savings aren't real. Consumption's up too. And the grasping for resources reveals there's too few.
So the boom turns to bust as the interest rates rise, where the cost of production price signals were lies
The boom was a binge, that's a matter of fact, now it's devalued capital that makes up a slap
Whether it's the late 20s or 2005, booming bad investments seems like they'd thrive
You must save to invest, don't use the printing press, or a bust will surely follow, an economy depressed
Your so-called stimulus will make things worse, just more of the same, more incentives perverse
And that credit crunch ain't a liquidity trap, just a broke banking system, I'm done, that's a wrap
We've been going back and forth for a century, I want to steer markets, I want them set free
There's a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it, claim all interest rates, nah, it's the animal spirit
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood
Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.
Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence
are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men
how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
All right.
That's the first time I think it took longer to set up watching the video than watching
Thank you for that warm reception. I can't say I didn't expect it. But you are a good
crowd for this video. You are the crowd. I've already talked about all these great things
I was reading that allowed me to do this as a non-economist, which apparently is an advantage
If you want to make something that communicates economic ideas, perhaps.
It's a dig.
You know, talked about this good man right here,
this bad stuff right here, and really underneath it all,
I think what we're all worried about is that, right?
You know, I mean, I think that there's a sense in which
there's an intellectual game to be played here, and it's a lot
This is a lot of fun because these are ideas and you know if you're here you're an intellectual if you're in this room and so there's a there's a lot of fun in that but it does matter and that's why I spent then my nights and weekends for the past year doing this and not even for the profit motive which sometimes you need more than that so I want to talk to you about the creative process a little bit which is something probably a little less familiar with you know the first thing that we did was we had to pick the musical
School Style, and this was interesting because our first idea, and I'm talking a lot about
the Austrian side and about my contribution, but Russ Roberts was absolutely a partner.
And perhaps the most interesting thing about this project was that I contributed more economics
than Russ in so far as I understood how to tell the Hayek story, whether I understand
it or not, we'll see. And Russ had a lot of great visual ideas and he's a great storyteller
So the first idea we had was not a rap video, it was a sitcom, Cane's In The City.
And in this sitcom, John Maynard Cane's, again this is February 2009, so we all know it was
being passed right around then, this video, this mini sitcom would basically show Cane's
Keynes living out his life and his ideology as a practical matter, which means getting
laid off and just continuing your aggregate demand on the credit card.
We pretty quickly realized that we weren't going to necessarily be able to pull that
off in the way I'd want to, so Russ said, why don't we do just the opening theme song
for what Keynes and the City could be?
And his idea, which was hilarious, was let's have it be staying alive, since that's what
his ideas seem to do. So he wrote lyrics for Cane's Staying Alive. Now I shouldn't play
this because it's embarrassing, but I'm going to give you just a preview of Cane's Staying
Alive. I wasn't planning on this, but since we got so tripped up on that I might as well
embarrass myself a little more. Let me, I'm going to dig this out here. Let's see. I,
Okay, roughs. Old. Okay, now this. I'm not going to play the whole thing because it's just as long. But this is me.
I can't believe I'm doing this.
Well, by the way, I use my chalk, I'm an econ man, and I love to talk
When economic darkness falls, I come to life, a nation calls
And with the alright, it's okay, cause I've returned to save the day
The New York Times, my biggest fan, will help me set a stimulus plan
Whenever there's recession, the better a depression
I'm so stayin' alive, stayin' alive, feel the spending growin' and know the debt is flowin'
All right, I'll stop it there. I'll stop it there. Yeah, that's a, that's a cheat just for this crowd. That does not actually, that doesn't exist. Not for real.
Okay, maybe it exists for real, just for that one minute, but after that, okay. I am being
streamed live on the internet. Oh, great. Okay, anyway. Am I red? Am I really red? Okay.
So being that I'm a professional, I work at Spike TV, I produce and direct commercials
and campaigns for things like the video game awards and Deadliest Warrior coming April
I realized pretty quickly that the music rights, if we wanted this to be as big as we hoped
it would be, would be a nightmare and not possible.
So that put us back to the drawing board, and part of what that drawing board meant
was really thinking hard about how it is that we're going to really do this enterprise of
expanding awareness of what we want to say beyond the choir, because that plays great
to the choir.
You guys love that, but nobody on the margin to speak to another Austrian idea is going
to care about that.
They're going to see that as just a criticism of Keynes and, okay, these guys are right-wingers
that hate Keynes.
So we said, let's, you know, the reason why I reached out to Russ was that I really thought
he was a fair person, even though he's as libertarian as they come, shy of an anarchist.
So he said, let's do, let's do both. We're gonna let Keynes have his say. We're gonna
be fair to his ideas. Then we're gonna smash him. But at least he will have his hearing
and no one can claim that we just hacked it up and that this is a hack job. And that might
give it just a chance of being used in a school and maybe even by someone that's not an Austrian.
And so that's what we did. And we went back to the drawing board and again, Russ making
a creative contribution, jokingly said, let's do a rap song. And he was laughing, you know,
he's not a rap guy. And I said, no, that's great. You know, rap's really libertarian.
You know, they're gun rights, you know. Legal drugs. It's a battle. It's everything we want.
It's perfect.
Oh yeah, and I mean, if anybody's on the gold standard, it's rappers.
So I mean, maybe from the, no, I think Master P. has a gold-plated tank, so even though
they don't, they don't wear it outwardly, but it's still a factor, there's still, maybe
it's more, it's 100% reserves.
So okay, so I'd never written a rap song before, I had no idea how to go about that.
It's like a poem, so that was a place to start, and we had all these Keynes lyrics from my
screeching first version.
So we began listening to songs and trying to pick what kind of sound, and I reached
out to a music production company, Blackboard Three in New York, to help me produce the
music part, the instrumental, and then one night after listening to Remember the Name
about 150 times, just to get a sense, because it had that sort of classical element as an
undertone, I wanted a sort of classical strings part, because it's, you know, it's the 1930s,
back to life. I just sat down and started writing this poem, taking the lyrics, and
Man, Hayek's stuff came easy for some reason, because I'm a freak.
It was a lot longer.
There was references to Japan's public works were a lesson in fail, your economic theories
are stale, and boom in the late 40s and 50s was tops despite large post-war government
spending drops and stuff like that.
I mean, it goes on and on.
And I'm amazed at how successful this video has been considering its length.
These things don't usually go seven minutes and keep anybody's attention.
So you know, we had our script.
The next step was to cast performers.
And the first thing I did was say, you know, all along the way that my idea for this was
it's got to just be a real thing.
It's not a joke.
These aren't joke ideas.
It's not going to be a joke video.
It's going to be a real song.
We're going to produce it professionally with my team from Spike that I use.
Mises is not a spike-endorsed project, but you know, on a personal level.
So the first thing I did was have a couple of Brooklyn and Bronx rappers, like up and
coming people, I guess, I don't know, come in and try this out, and I quickly realized
these lyrics are not for these guys.
It's not that they couldn't do it, but I couldn't understand it, and I wrote it.
So it's like, with Russ.
So I turned to someone that always finds exactly what you need, no matter what, my wife. And
after one day, she turned up these guys, Billy and Adam. Now, notice his glasses. I mean,
I was like, he's wearing Hayek's glasses. This is crazy. It's two guys. They're white
comedy rappers and he's got Hayek's glasses. So that was sort of a little moment of providence
They turned out to be really great people and really great partners, and I said, listen,
this is a project that you're going to have to invest some time in because you're going
to need to actually understand this enough to know the inflections, though I will provide
you with guidance on that, but we need to be able to get it.
The capital structure is key.
And so these two guys became these two guys.
We rehearsed and revised and shortened, so Japan's malaise goes away.
We left out the empirics, like a good Austrian.
I'm glad that went over, and we recorded the track.
Making motion pictures is a process akin to a construction site.
That's really what it is.
It's, you know, you have to scout your locations, you have to secure the crew.
It's all logistics.
It's not flashy at all.
It's me doing that.
It's me driving around a box truck in the snow to pick up and drop off gear.
Some of the most important, which is bags of sand that you actually put on the light
stands so that they don't fall over and kill somebody.
And a very large relative to this project, who came together on this, which was not a
surprise but in some ways was a surprise because this is criticizing the mainstream.
This is criticizing good old Obama and his stimulus plan.
It's not the kind of thing that you'd expect to get a lot of support from the creative community,
even if they're my friends.
And I think perhaps my outlook on how to approach these things is guided by how kind my friends
are even if some of them are socialists.
So the next step is to edit and animate the graphics, the color corrected, put together
the post-production process.
You got an unfortunate and unplanned preview of how that happens.
And then we were done.
I'm going to give you one other preview, just again part of a little bit of a window into
the process, and a preview of what Russ and I are hoping to be a contest that will be
hosted on Econ Stories. And that is, it's your turn to make the Hayek and Keynes rap.
So here is an early green screen cut.
So you can see sort of where that starts.
We are going to post that video online and basically put a call out to all the creative
people in the world to reimagine this project and the qualification will be it has to illuminate
further.
It cannot denigrate, but I'm sure we'll get plenty of that too, it's all right.
And so I'm going to just wrap this out, maybe over my time with a little slideshow.
So the little still camera, this was filmed on a $1600 still camera, the Canon 7D, which
in and of itself is sort of a miracle.
And a part of why that was done is because actually within that creative, within sort
of the creative community, it was a new gadget, so it was like anything that can generate
buzz.
I'm going to shoot on the latest camera and do it in this new way with this new camera
that will help, you know, maybe get people to spread the word.
So you can see some of what went into it. There's my buddy Josh who edited the video.
There's me rigging lights, our cast.
This was a 16 plus hour day.
It started at 12 o'clock on the 20th and went to 5 or 6 o'clock in the morning on the 21st.
On December 20th, New York City got hit with about 2 feet of snow.
So you might have noticed that while Keynes and Hayek are waiting for their limo to arrive there are Keynes and Hayek sized mountains of snow.
One of the things I had to do in that snow was the day before, I was thinking about what am I going to do, how am I going to edit together the sequence when Hayek arrives in the hotel room.
The whole purpose of that little open is just to sort of establish that here's Keynes and Hayek, we say their names, name to a face, people that don't know get it, and then Keynes is going to invite him down, he's already drinking, so he's got the party started already, so all those little moments are in there, but what's Hayek going to do in his room?
and I hadn't actually really thought it through.
I was like, oh, he's gonna maybe like look at things
and be amazed that the phone is wireless or something.
I don't know.
And then we checked into the hotel and I was like,
oh my God, the Bible.
Well, if there's a Bible for mainstream economics,
it's the general theory, whether they like it or not.
So I didn't have a copy of the general theory.
I actually had to drive through the snow
the morning that we shot to the Barnes and Noble
to buy a copy of the general theory.
It's a good thing I didn't need to buy prices in production.
Man, only this crowd can these jokes work.
So, all this work, all this effort, this entire narrative, my entire life,
I forgot to mention that, again, the only reason why music was done at all was because
While I was coming home and spending all my time reading Mises.org and talking about the evils of the minimum wage and, you know, all this good stuff, my wife was like,
this is the most boring thing, I can't believe this is what you're so excited about.
If you're going to do this, it has to be music, because that's the only way people can get into something this boring.
Even in the middle of like the collapse of the economy, it's still boring.
So my wife is also responsible, aside from finding the talent and helping to find the
locations and being a co-producer on the project, it probably wouldn't have been music without
her.
And it probably wouldn't have been successful without music, so a lot of its impact goes
to my wife, Lisa.
So as you've probably seen, there's not a lot of mainstream news outlets that report on economics that are worth very much, although Bloomberg's great, I do like Bloomberg.
Tom Keen on The Economy is actually one of the podcasts I was listening to, although he's obviously a Keynesian.
But NPR's Planet Money team is pretty amazing, and Russ had a relationship with them, so I mean they had George Selgin on to talk about the alternative point of view on the FDIC, like who does that?
Who does that with anybody that people actually know about, as far as like non-interested people, the mainstream?
And so we got on the opening day, January 25th, we got on NPR's All Things Considered on the radio, which has a very large viewership, and that really kicked us off.
And I have to thank those guys a lot. But the interesting story, if you heard that segment, was that while Russ was there playing the video for the team at Planet Money,
The pop star Kesha was in the building and they invited her over to listen to the track and watch it.
And amazingly, she actually watched the whole thing and then said something to the effect of,
It's really good rapping.
Which, I mean, how much better could you get than that?
It's a completely bizarre novel thing with rap and you've got a pop star talking about it.
So it went live. The next day, which started to indicate the impact that this could possibly have,
Somebody posted this picture below on their Twitter account.
It's a picture of some college student somewhere
watching the video off of the website in their presumably economics class.
That's the second day, somewhere, who knows where it is.
We live in Hayek's world.
I think the next generation recognizes that, even if they don't understand the language of it.
Command and control and central planning just play no part in this world.
So, you know, as of right now, we've had over 1 million views worldwide.
About 938 or 39,000 on the main video.
It's been voluntarily translated into something like 12 languages.
Not overdubbed, but actually even more, well, not more work per se, but, you know, subtitled.
The French version has 40,000 views.
Maybe Sarkozy is just a start.
It's also gotten broad mainstream support.
When you Google it and bring up the articles, what you find is a lot of mainstream outlets
pick this up.
I'm sure it's at least 90% the novelty, but I think it's also the times and the tone.
And, of course, as that picture explains as being used in schools, we got sent a lesson
plan from a teacher in Hong Kong that has built a lesson around the video to teach introductory
macro.
And so they watch it like three or four times over the course and slowly deconstruct, like,
okay, well, what's sticky wages and reality?
People don't instantly change the way they put it.
So I've been talking about this, the philosophy, and I think this is important.
I'm new to this community that you guys have been participating in for a long time.
I don't know all the divisions.
I love all you guys, though, so it doesn't matter.
I think Milton Friedman's great.
He might be wrong on money, but he's great.
So to me, I see an opportunity to bring a tone to this work and a philosophy to this
This is what I'm going to be about, hopefully for the rest of my life, of putting our ideas
out there in a way that's broader, in a way that aims at the margin.
The people that are undecided, the people that are interested and don't yet have their
mind made up, and the rest of us can love it as well.
And so, you know, these are sort of our principles, you know, honest, confident criticism, Keynes
is wrong for the most part and we should be able to put him out there fully and let him
reveal for himself that he thinks broken windows and digging ditches is good for the economy.
I mean, it's ludicrous on his face, anybody that's ever had a leak in their house knows
that that's not good.
It's like, oh good, I get to replace my furnace.
Man, I feel wealthy.
I mean, this is all happening while I got a leak in my house and I'm like, oh, I'm sure
glad I'm stimulating the economy.
You know, real production value is just part of what my specialization, you know, the sound
economics, hopefully.
Roger can talk about that, but it seems like we've gotten it mostly right.
You know, it's funny how far you get when you assume people are smart.
You know, I think that that doesn't seem like a hard thing to do, but if you just assume
they're pretty smart and you make something that you like, avoiding cheap shots for the
most part.
Sometimes they're deserved.
We put a couple in there.
And going with your gut.
I just got into this Austrian economics and the business cycle and monetary policy and it's completely bizarre for me to get into that but I did and I love it and I'm just going to keep working on it and we didn't make this video because we thought X, Y and Z would like it, we made it because we love the ideas and I think that's the only way you can do things is you have to actually target what you care about, what you love and out of that will emerge all the other things that made it unique and great.
And you'd be amazed how many people on TV get that idea wrong.
What would the kids like? Not what you're probably going to do.
So, okay.
Lastly, the future. Like I said, this is my endeavor. It is a vocation for me now.
So, we're going to do more. We're going to do more under the Econ Stories brand.
I want to do more outside of that.
I'm a big fan of the broken window problem, so that could be the next one.
We're working on it.
And that's it. I guess questions.
Well, I have to say that my reaction to that video was full of delight and shock.
You know, how did this happen? Who is this person to do this?
And my son showed it to me in his room at Berkeley.
It's weird, I forgot to say, so Roger's here and you know Jeff had a great idea to have Roger just sort of talk about what this, the contents of the video and his point of view and his, you know I was inspired by his visualization of Hayek and the five stage capital structure is all, is an
I wrote up notes for this comment a couple of days ago and then found this morning I rewrote them all together while John was talking, I rewrote them once again.
In fact, the last thing I wrote is, never follow John Popola to the podium, but I like my own comments, I want to talk about my own reaction to the video, the response I've seen from others, students and others, and the change in micropedagogy, I think that's really the key here, that the video not only mirrors, it shows what's going on, but it helps to facilitate as well.
Now, I have to say, when I first saw the video, I wondered out loud, okay, will a rap version of Keynes and Hayek really increase a student's receptiveness to the Austrian theories?
But before I could even seriously doubt that it would, another thought occurred to me, and that video certainly had increased my receptiveness to rap music.
So that's my half of bridging the generation gap.
I know for me, rap music is something like opera, in the sense that you have to already
know the story before you can watch and listen.
And I said, well, okay, I know the story of the Austrian theory of the business cycle,
so I can watch and listen and enjoy it, even if it's rap, okay, I like it.
Now, if you look at the other half, it's college people who don't know the story, but they
already like rap video.
Well, hey, it's a win-win situation, okay, they got it made, they can enjoy it, listen
to the words and get the story.
Now, I have to say, I particularly like the treatment of the bust as the hangover that
follows the excessive drinking.
I have to say, my favorite part of the video is that toilet mold scene.
My wife says I've always been a sucker for bathroom humor anyhow, but it's a great scene.
And yet there's a deeper meaning to it that I'm sure that John and Russell are both aware of.
And that is Paul Krugman has become infamous for disparaging the Austrian theory by calling it the hangover theory.
Yeah, and Popola and Roberts boldly and correctly embrace the analogy and thereby turn Krugman's ill-tempered critique into very effective pedagogy.
So I applaud them for that. It's a great part.
From my vantage point as the teacher of macroeconomics in an auditorium, I have 240 sophomores teach macroeconomics to.
I can attest to the early success, as I'm sure most of you can, and Jeff already has, so I'll make mine short.
I was certainly pleased to get an email from John Papola not long after the video came out,
but it turns out I, like so many others of you, I'm sure had already gotten several emails
and continued to get more and more, and they continue coming even today from colleagues and former students
I'm sending me links to the video and soon enough I started receiving emails from my own students in the current semester and I'm still talking about Keynes in that course and so I've mentioned Hayek a few times but that comes later but my own students are sending me links to this video I've never had anything like that they don't send me links to anything but there it is and some of them have began to ask in class am I going to show
Why don't I show this in class?
And the answer is simple, we haven't got to that part yet.
We have to wait until we get to that part, and then I'll show it and link it to my PowerPoints and to my website.
But I have to say that the most refreshing reaction came from a couple of textbook salespeople.
You all know them, if you're a professor at a university, who paid me a routine office visit to explain what macro texts they had.
Two young ladies that showed up in my office. Now I have to say they sounded less than enthusiastic
when they started explaining what they had. They said well we've got one book that presents several
schools of thought all in terms of the aggregate supply aggregate demand model. And I said well
that's fine but I just don't think in terms of aggregate supply and aggregate demand. They said
well we have another book that starts with solo growth model and then deals with short-run
and Variation in Output and Employment.
So that's fine, but I don't teach the solo growth model.
Okay, so we have a book that presents
real business cycle theory and then follows up
with considerations of menu costs,
as identified by the new Keynesians.
It's fine, again, but I don't teach any of that stuff.
And they say, well, what do you teach?
And so I said, well, I present Keynesian theory
to explain what policies the government
The Theory of Money and Credit
That was a great experience. Now, if you look at the pedagogy, and I'll make this short, I know we're running short of time, but the debate used to be centered on rules versus discretion.
Some of you are old enough to remember those days. That was Friedman and Heller, Friedman and monetarists and things used to be divided by rules, where you have discretionary changes and macro policy tools and so on.
and later it evolved into all about expectations, are expectations static, are they adaptive, are they rational in some sense or other, so we've gone through all of that
and even today a lot of that stuff is relevant, certainly Friedman's quantity theory of money is relevant, MV equals PQ still, but as time goes by, as semester follows semester,
I find that I teach less of that. In fact, I use it mainly as a little interlude, a little interlude between the Keynesian theory and the Hayekian theory.
And the contrast there is the same one that's in the video. It's really a contrast between markets don't work, Keynes and markets do work, Hayek.
And that's the pedagogy that at least my course has evolved to, and I think it's happened elsewhere, and it's perfectly captured in the video. So I applaud the makers for that.
Well that's really cool. So thank you Roger. So I guess I know we're five minutes over but I want to take questions so does anyone else have any questions?
Mike Munger. So Mike and Russ are good friends. And Mike's pretty Austrian. So he just was
into it. And he's a really nice guy. And he came up in that snow, no less. So I wasn't
sure what role he was going to have. Originally, there was... Oh, he was the limo driver. Originally,
there was going to be a scene, and this is just the way this process works, where they
They arrive and there's the moment, and actually we even contemplated that Hayek wouldn't take
the limo, he'd take the subway.
You might have noticed that when he had a little New York City metro card in his hand,
people say that's more, people I think maybe sometimes unfairly criticize it as being moralizing.
I think it's just called being smart.
But there was gonna be a scene where they arrived and everyone loves canes and there's
The Press and all the bulbs are flashing and Kayak is already getting left behind there
and the bouncer was going to be Mike Monger but time and snow killed that scene.
So Mike Monger became the limo driver.
It's econstories.tv.
Cost of production on this thing must have been significant, and even though it's your profession, can you comment a little bit on that? I mean, you've got hotel rooms, limo drivers, cast, cameras, lights, it goes on and off.
Normally, and I was actually having to learn things that I'm glad I had to relearn because,
you know, there is specialization. You don't do everything anymore. So, I was driving around
picking up equipment myself, dropping it off the next day in Harlem and to make this the
right way would probably cost close to $100,000. That's not what it costs. But that's about
about what it should cost, if you were going to pay people market wages and they didn't
know you or care about your dreams and aspirations, so, yeah, that's pretty much, yeah, it cost
a fraction of that, but that's what it should have.
New York City casting agents have a lot of resources.
There hasn't been monetization yet.
I think, you know, my vision for this is I'd like to destroy the circular flow and banish
it from thought.
It's an awful, awful place to start. Again, I'm glad I didn't learn it, because had I,
it probably would have trapped my mind in a fallacy. So if there's a business model
out of this, because it needs to be free, everything we do needs to be free for the
sake of the main goal, which is advancing high. A million views wouldn't have happened
if we were charging. But you make really compelling content that happens to have some Austrian
and I think a lot of teachers, and we've seen that with this, even if they're not Austrians
they can't help but use it because it's like, it wakes their students up so I want to make,
I want to basically lure all of the educators in this planet to use Austrian-laced content
to teach their classes. It's going to be a, it's a stated goal but it's still going to
be a drug.
What about the music? What did you end up doing about that?
It's an unusual thing. So, you know, we worked out an arrangement with the composer to share whatever profit may come, and etc.
But it is our track. I don't think it sounds quite like anything.
I'm sure it sounds like something. There's only so many chords, but, you know, you can't quite patent them yet.
You almost can't. So, anything else?
Alright, well, thank you so much.
Thank you very much.