May 20, 2025 • 30 mins
Roger welcomes Robert Lawson, economist, author, and director of the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom at Southern Methodist University. Lawson is the co-author of “Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World.”
In this episode, they discuss Lawson’s firsthand observations from socialist regimes including Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea and how central planning continues to fail the people living under it. They explore the dangerous appeal of socialism in modern political discourse, the real differences between Scandinavian welfare states and actual socialist systems, and why economic freedom remains essential to human flourishing. Plus, they highlight the power (and unfortunate rarity) of an engaging and accessible economics education that equips students with a lifelong understanding of how the world works.
Robert Lawson is a founding co-author of the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World annual report, which presents an economic freedom index for over 160 countries tracking which nations thrive—and which collapse—based on policy choices. He received the 2025 TFAS Gary M. Walton Award for Excellence in Economic Education.
The Liberty + Leadership Podcast is hosted by TFAS president Roger Ream and produced by Podville Media. If you have a comment or question for the show, please email us at podcast@TFAS.org. To support TFAS and its mission, please visit TFAS.org/support.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership podcast,
a conversation with TFAS alumni,faculty and friends who are
making an impact.
Today.
I'm your host, Roger Ream.
Today on Liberty and Leadership, my guest is Robert Lawson,
Director of the BridwellInstitute for Economic Freedom
(00:22):
at Southern Methodist UniversityInstitute for Economic Freedom
at Southern Methodist University.
Bob is also a clinicalprofessor and the Jerome M
Fulenwider Centennial Chair inEconomic Freedom.
Bob is a prolific writer who hasauthored or co-authored over
100 academic publications.
He is the founding co-author ofthe Fraser Institute's Economic
(00:42):
Freedom of the World AnnualReport and he co-wrote with
Benjamin Powell the best-sellingbook Socialism Sucks.
Two Economists Drink their WayThrough the Unfree World.
Bob's accolades include beingsenior fellow at the Fraser
Institute, a member of the MontPelerin Society and the past
(01:02):
president of the Association ofPrivate Enterprise Education,
from whom he received theirprestigious Adam Smith Award.
Bob is also recently therecipient of TFAS's 2025 Gary M
Walton Award for Excellence inEconomic Education, which we
presented to him at our annualconference in Naples, Florida,
(01:23):
this past March.
Bob, welcome to the show.
Hi, Roger, Good to be here.
Well, you know, this book,Socialism Sucks, was published
in 2019, if I'm not mistaken,and it's a great book.
I suspect it's still selling,at least somewhat.
I hope it's something thatcollege professors at least are
giving to students or parentsare buying for young people,
(01:44):
because it has lessons in herethat we certainly need today, in
2025.
Let me begin by just asking youkind of, what was the
motivation or where'd the ideacome to you and to Ben Powell to
take off and travel the worldto see what socialism was really
like?
Speaker 2 (02:00):
It really didn't start out as a socialism book as
such.
It might've been a midlifecrisis.
I'm in my mid-50s, ben's in hismid-40s.
We both checked off a lot ofour career boxes.
You know professors at majoruniversities.
We both run fairly majorinstitutes.
I run the Bridwell Institute,he runs something called the
Free Market Institute at TexasTech and you know one more
(02:20):
journal article doesn't reallyadvance our career that much at
the margin at this point and wehave big travel budgets.
So we're like, you know, let'sgo somewhere.
I wanted to go to Cuba just tosee it, and being professors, it
was easy for us to go.
We don't need any.
You know special requirementsor rules to follow.
But as we were writing itthough, you know, bernie Sanders
(02:41):
became a credible candidate forthe presidency and he calls
himself a socialist.
He usually calls himself ademocratic socialist, to maybe
soften the edge of that word,but he's socialist and AOC had
been elected.
And so we decided, since halfthe countries we were targeting
anyway on this midlife crisis,half of them, were socialists,
we just sort of pivoted the bookto talk about socialism, to
(03:03):
sort of ride the Bernie wave,and one thing led to another,
and there we are.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Since you mentioned Bernie Sanders on your second
chapter I think it is is aboutVenezuela and you quote Bernie
Sanders there, and this is himin 2011.
He writes these days, theAmerican dream is more apt to be
realized in South America, inplaces such as Ecuador,
venezuela and Argentina this wasbefore Malay, of course where
(03:28):
incomes are actually more equaltoday than they are in the land
of Horatio Alger, who's thebanana republic now.
I mean, that is such a tellingquote you found of him.
His measure of success isequality, so in that sense,
venezuela is the socialistparadise.
Everyone's equally destitute,except for the rulers, of course
.
Let's talk about Venezuela.
(03:49):
You found equality there.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
I guess Everyone was in the same situation trying to
get across to Colombia to buyfood in the sense that rich and
poor alike were walking acrossthe border to go shopping,
because on the Venezuelan sidethere were massive and there
still are massive shortages ofbasic items aspirin, deodorant,
(04:14):
rice, beans, diapers forchildren, everything.
And so we saw peasants, peoplewho were clearly very, very poor
, walking across the border tobuy things.
And we saw well-dressed,well-mannered, clearly not
peasant Venezuelans who werealso crossing the border.
So there was a sort of equalityof misery and equality of
(04:35):
shortage.
The people we talked to at theborder it was Ana and Paulo Ana
Maria and Paulo and they hadcome three days.
One way They'd driven fromCiudad Bolivar, which is on the
far other side of Venezuela, sothey basically crossed the
entire country to come to theColombian border to go grocery
shopping.
And they were middle-classpeople.
(04:56):
Paulo had a little English, heworked in a hotel.
I mean again, these were notpeasants.
I don't want to make light ofpoverty, but when poor people by
necessity do crazy things likewalk great distances for water,
for food, but when you see asociety where even the sort of
middle and upper class that was,when you know this was a
societal level breakdown, Let meask when you went I know in
(05:18):
Venezuela you were able to goacross the border briefly you
had to be a little careful,since you had families back home
you wanted to get home to InCuba.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Did you sense you had handlers who were monitoring
where you went and what you didand who you talked to?
Speaker 2 (05:33):
No, not, obviously.
And again, we didn't sign upfor one of the friends to
friends or whatever they callthem, tours, and if you do that
you're going to have a handlerthrough your trip.
We just got on a charter planeand at this time it was relaxing
a little bit.
You could fly on a charter, nota commercial like scheduled
airline, but you could get on acharter.
It was actually operated byAmerican Airlines, but we flew
(05:55):
from Miami to Cuba, just asprivate individuals had
organized visas ahead of timethe usual drill.
But we got there and we werecompletely unscheduled.
We didn't even know ourselveswhere we were going half the
time.
We were deliberately doing itthat way.
We wanted to get a sort of morerealistic view I mean as
realistic as two sort of richobviously not Cuban Americans
(06:15):
can.
I mean we're never going to geta full picture as visitors of
what it's like to live there.
So we, you know, we ended upstaying in sort of off the
beaten path hotels, which werehorrible, and ended up spending
most of our time in parts ofHavana and parts of the island
that tourists would nottypically go to.
We didn't have a realinterpreter there.
(06:35):
My Spanish is pretty muchrestaurant.
Spanish and English on Cuba isnot as prevalent as it would, be
say, in most of Latin America,but still we were able to talk
to people and I didn't get muchsense of guardedness from them.
But again, I wasn't able toreally have deep conversations
either.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
A colleague of mine visited Cuba part of one of
those educationalfriend-to-friend tours a few
years before you did, and onestory she brought back was being
taken to a school to beimpressed with how high tech it
was.
And they walked into thecomputer room and there were all
these young kids in there oncomputers and she noticed they
(07:15):
were all using just their indexfingers to type.
So it appeared that this mayhave been the first day they
were ever on the computer, thatthey were brought into this
classroom to impress theseAmericans about how high tech
the schools were.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
There was one anecdote and in retrospect it
occurred to me he might havebeen a plant or somebody, but we
were walking up the steps atthe old, glorious well, it's
decrepit now, but the gloriousUniversity of Havana, and
beautiful, you know colonialarchitecture.
And we're walking up the stairs.
And again, beautiful, you knowcolonial architecture.
And we're walking up the stairs.
(07:47):
And again, we're clearly notCuban by our dress and
everything.
And this young man is 20something year old.
I was walking down and just ashe passed us on the steps he
turned around and says hey, inperfect English.
And again, that was unusual.
He said where are you guys from?
And you know I said Los EstadosUnidos and we had a nice
conversation.
This was again right after somerelaxation.
President Obama had come andvisited the island for the first
(08:09):
time and a president do thatforever now and there was some
falling in relations.
And the kid said I'm not makingthis up.
He said to us as we wereleaving, he said we're so happy
you Americans are coming becauseyou bring us more freedom.
He actually said that and ofcourse I get chills when I tell
(08:30):
the story now.
We thought he was going to saywe're happy you're bringing more
money, and I wouldn't haveblamed him for that view.
I mean, we all like money buthe understood that the thawing
of relations between the twocountries was likely to bring
freedom to Cuba as well astourist dollars.
And we were stupid we're notactual journalists, you know and
we just said, all right, seeyou man.
And we let him go and we shouldhave invited him to dinner
because he could have told us alot.
But it did occur to me thatmaybe he was some sort of spy
(08:53):
that you know.
But I don't think so.
I didn't get that, you know atall.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
One thing that's noteworthy, and you touch on it
too is, you know, in Venezuela Itouch on it too is you know in
Venezuela?
I don't know what the number isnow I think in your book you
say three or four million peoplehave fled the country.
Cuba, of course, has had anexodus by boat and by any means
possible, north Korea.
People who are able to get out,it's at great risk to their
(09:18):
lives and not many do make it,but some do you know.
This evidence is that socialismis just terrible for human
beings.
It destroys countries,economies and life itself.
And yet you know you have lotsof people advocating socialism
and you, in fact, at the end ofthe book you talk about going to
a socialist convention inChicago.
(09:39):
I think it is, but what's yourconclusion there?
Is it that economists don't doan adequate job explaining it?
Why is it that socialism's yourconclusion there?
Is it that economists don't doan adequate job explaining it?
Why is it that socialism stillhas this appeal?
Or people just don't associatesocialism with the evils of
these places?
Speaker 2 (09:53):
There are some evil people in the socialist movement
, but I generally don't thinkthat we can just attribute this
to pure evil.
I mean there is injustice inthe world.
I mean people do see poverty tobe an injustice.
To an extent, inequality peoplesee as an injustice and racism,
sexism.
There's a whole bunch of thingsthat are just bad in our world
(10:16):
and many people are deeplyconcerned and care about that.
And socialists are selling thisutopic vision, this gloriously
well-lit future that's going toget rid of sexism and it's going
to get rid of inequality andwhatever injustice is bothering
you.
The socialists are going topromise to fix it and it's very
intoxicating, particularly whenyou're young, to latch onto that
.
Now.
Analytically, socialism,meaning the collective control
(10:39):
of resources in the hands of acentral planner that economic
system is a failure.
Empirically it's a failure, asyou know.
It's also a theoretical failure.
One of the sayings sometimesyou'll hear Marxists or socials
say is you know, it's good intheory, but maybe it doesn't
work in practice.
Well, no, it's actually notgood in theory either.
The problem is the theory ishard Understanding the
(10:59):
intricacies of why prices set bymarkets are better than prices
set by bureaucrats.
I'm just saying that isactually analytically
challenging and it's notsomething that a lot of people
are going to get.
I think that's the main thingis just this sort of
intoxicating snake oil that theysell and it does make you feel
good for a while, maybe.
I mean snake oil usually wasbasically alcohol, and it makes
(11:20):
you feel good for a minute andit doesn't cure the disease.
In fact, taking too much it canmake it worse.
So I think that's the mainissue.
When we were at the socialismconference in Chicago, I took
that to be an optimistic spin inthe sense that they weren't
literally interested inmurdering people, which is the
fact of the matter is, socialismhas resulted in the direct
(11:41):
murder of millions, tens ofmillions of people in different
places.
They weren't for that, theyweren't just pure evil.
The challenge for us is how dowe communicate that?
And one of the things that thereason we wrote this book, which
is a little bit of a man on thestreet, a little bit of a you
know two middle-aged broscarousing, drinking too much
beer and so forth was to try totell that story in a way that's
(12:05):
different than the normal wayeconomists tell it.
You know, I've got books.
I've got, you know, stacks ofjournal articles that no one's
read, and so we figured, ifwe're going to try to
communicate to the sort ofBernie bros of the world, we
needed to do it with a vehiclethat was going to be more
approachable to them.
There is another dimension, andthat is our side.
By that I mean sort of thepeople that believe in private
(12:26):
property and markets and freedomof exchange and so forth.
We're selling hard medicine.
It actually is medicine thatwill cure a lot of those
diseases, but they're nevergoing to go away.
We're never going to get rid ofracism, sexism, completely
probably, and a lot of timesthat we're selling like, hey,
you need to take this medicine,you need to take this free trade
medicine and it's going to makeyou better in the future, but
(12:48):
right now it feels painful andthat's bad politics, it's just
bad marketing in a lot of ways.
But we're right, our medicinedoes cure.
It helps the patient.
Socialism is a tonic that makesyou feel good in the short run
but hurts you in the long run.
Our medicine does the reverse.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
I recall Hayek, in something he wrote, suggested
that something along the linesthat you were saying.
That came to my mind that theadvocates for the free society
need a utopian vision.
We don't have that.
We're competing against theutopian vision and we're lacking
that in what we do.
And he wrote that years ago andperhaps we have that to some
(13:24):
extent in talking about thegreat enrichment that took place
and the billions of peoplelifted out of poverty through
prices and property rights andmarkets.
But I think you're ontosomething there.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Yeah, but our future is an open-ended one.
Liberalism, and again in theoriginal sense of that word, is
an open-ended future.
It's not an end point, I guess.
Yeah, it's also what you decide.
It's what the person next toyou decides their future is.
And we're letting you decidewhat utopia you want to build
with your friends, neighbors,family, you know, and so forth,
whereas the socialists, they'vegot a vision, they've
(13:58):
preordained what they think isgoing to happen.
We're sort of saying well,trust us, the future is going to
be great, but you have to trustus.
Well, and someone asked what'sthe future going to look like?
We're like well, that's for youto decide.
Again, it's not very easy tosell that product, I think.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
In your first chapter , you and Ben Powell visit
Sweden, which is often pointedto by people such as Bernie
Sanders and others as thesocialism they're talking about,
though you found that quotewhere he actually says Venezuela
, ecuador, is the model.
But what did you find when youwent to the Scandinavian
countries, particularly inSweden?
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Well, we found good beer and that was our first tell
that it wasn't socialist.
The beer was expensive and, asyou know, sweden has very high
taxes.
It's a very large, fiscal,large government.
They tax and spend a lot.
But if you look at thestructure of the Swedish economy
, it's in no way, shape or formsocialist Socialism and we
define this at the beginning ofthe book to make sure everyone's
(14:52):
on the same page.
It's defined as a collectivecontrol of resources, the means
of production, the factories,the farms, the workers, that
there's a collective control ofthose things.
In a sense there's going to bea central plan and for large
societies that has always meantthe state.
The state is going to be thecentral planner for how the
(15:13):
economy runs.
And the Swedish economy has abig government.
But those bureaucrats inStockholm don't run the economy.
Volvo is a famous Swedish firm.
They're a completely privatecompany.
Their stock trades on stockexchanges.
The workers go home toprivately owned homes and flats
and apartments and whatever, andthey drive private cars.
(15:34):
There's no major system ofallocating, picking you off the
street and say well, you'regoing to be an engineer, you're
going to be a mathematician,you're going to be a taxi car
driver.
People get to decide their ownoccupations in a pretty open
labor market.
So the Swedish economy isstructurally very much like ours
.
Sure, they have a biggovernment, but people are quite
free to choose their ownoccupations, their own lines of
(15:56):
work, paint their houses the waythey want to paint them.
Again, there's probably ruleson that.
But Swedish farmers and Swedishfishermen own their own fish.
They decide if they go outTuesday or Wednesday, and all of
that.
There's no central plan.
And that's the differencebetween, say, cuba and Sweden,
where in Cuba there's a centralplan, like the restaurants, the
farms, the factories, thefishing fleets, everything is
(16:20):
owned by the government andaligned with some kind of plan
that the bureaucrats in Havanahave written down on paper.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
You also, as I mentioned, produce the Index of
Economic Freedom with the FraserInstitute each year.
Where does a country likeSweden rank, and do you recall
where it ranks in your latestranking?
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Yeah sure.
So my day job, so to speak,isn't to travel the country and
drink beer with Ben, as fun asthat was is to be a professor,
and the research product I workon is the Economic Freedom of
the World Index, and we rate andrank countries for the degree
to which they're following sortof free market principles.
The first country in the listis Hong Kong, and like Singapore
(17:00):
, and then the last one isVenezuela.
Venezuela was dead last.
So Sweden.
As a matter of fact, when wewrote the book they were in the
high 20s.
I think they dropped to the 30s, but they're out of 165
countries that we score, Swedenis in the upper quarter of the
rankings.
It's much closer to free marketHong Kong or United States,
let's say than they areVenezuela.
(17:21):
Venezuela is hard socialism now.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Where'd the US rank in the latest ranking?
Speaker 2 (17:27):
We're fifth in the last rankings and we've been in
the sort of top 10.
We used to be third.
It was for decades of doingthis project.
The US was always third andthen we've dropped considerably
in terms of the number and theranking a little bit over the
last, say, two decades.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Have you given any thought to whether Hong Kong
would belong in there as anindependent country, now that
China's exerted so much controlover it?
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Well, we have.
So long as data are available,I'm going to continue to rate
Hong Kong.
That's my position and I wantto sort of document the decline
of freedom.
To be fair, most of the freedomdeclining there has been on the
political and civil libertiesside of things and we're not
measuring that in our index.
If you think about taxes andtariffs and basic property
(18:11):
rights, you know real estatetransactions and such.
That system has not changed alot in Hong Kong.
We do measure property rightsand rule of law in a broader
sense as well and Hong Kong'snumbers have gone down.
But they were very much infirst and now they're only
slightly in first.
I mean the tail's long.
Their score has dropped almostmore than any country in the
(18:31):
world.
They just went from reallyfirst to sort of just sort of
first.
One year in the index Singaporedid pass them.
They've been basically tied,statistically tied for the last
year.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
And I know there's a lag in terms of getting
statistics and your rating thatcomes out each year.
Just a thought and aside isgood luck trying to figure out
how you evaluate the US thisyear in terms of tariffs,
because they seem to change fromweek to week to week.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Well, I've done a little bit of an exercise.
We do lag a couple of years.
It takes a year for the data toget collected by the agencies
that collect it and then maybeanother year for us to get it
from them and process and such.
So you know, here is 2025.
I won't really have a numberfor the US until 2027.
With that said, you can do someback of the envelope
projections, sort of holdingeverything else equal With
(19:20):
respect to the biggest economicissue of the day tariffs.
Right now in the tariff we havea component for tariffs.
It measures tariffs in threedifferent ways but that
particular component the USranks 52nd out of 165.
So by no means are we very freemarket now.
We're not like that's a fewyears ago, right, yeah, that's
from 2023.
(19:41):
We project I mean, if thetariffs that Trump has outlined
now pass and stick, we'repredicting we would go from 50th
to somewhere in the 70s.
So we'll go from like uppermiddle to about basically middle
.
So it'll move us further awayfrom the free trade direction.
You know there's a lot ofcountries that are very
restrictive.
You know Iran and many of thesesuch countries.
(20:03):
So it'll take a hit.
The US score will take a hitOverall.
That effect probably lowers usfrom I said fifth.
I got them going to about 10thoverall based on these tariff
moves.
So it's not going to make usVenezuela right, but it's
definitely not going to move usup in the scores.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
I should mention we're recording this on May 6th,
so when Bob says if the tariffsare what they are today,
because they may be differenttomorrow or next week.
So, getting back to your book,you didn't visit North Korea but
you have a chapter on NorthKorea.
Could you talk about yourapproach to that country?
Since it's closed off?
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Well, we went to South Korea, went to Seoul and
did the usual DMZ tour.
That was kind of a tourist trap, but we kind of did the same
thing we did in Venezuela.
It was more interesting to goto the Colombian-Venezuela
border.
Likewise, we went to thenorthern North Korea border, the
southern China border, theborder with China.
It was a major city on theChinese side called Dandong.
It's a big city.
(21:00):
I mean, you've never heard ofit, probably, but like it's got
9 million people.
We would consider it likeDallas, fort Worth.
So it's a huge city, right thereon the border of North Korea,
on the old Yalu River, if youremember your Korean War history
and across the river is a major.
I forget the name of the cityon the North Korean side, but
it's hundreds of thousands ofpeople.
And one of the interestingthings is when we got there at
(21:21):
night we had an evening flightto arrive and we took a taxi to
our hotel right on the river andwe look across the river and
it's just utter darkness acrossthe river.
There were a couple pinpointpricks of light and then you
wake up in the morning and youlook across the river and there
is hundreds of thousands ofpeople.
It's a major city in NorthKorea, Mid-rise buildings, no
(21:42):
high rises like they have on theChinese side, so absolute
darkness.
People over there living inmedieval conditions.
We saw a guy using a tractor.
The tractor I could hear it,even though it was across the
river.
It was hundreds of meters awaybut I could hear it.
And it was his old dieseltractor, with that low thump,
thump, thump, low RPM dieseltractor and he had a very small
(22:03):
hill.
He was trying to get up.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
And.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
I felt so sorry for him, but he just, the tractor,
just couldn't do it, it just,and eventually he gave up and I
saw the.
But most of the people wereusing animals to pull plows and
things of that sort.
So when I say medieval, I meanit quite literally.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Yeah, so that view you had across the river at
night is similar to thatsatellite photo that is often
shown in presentations of theKorean peninsula at night.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Yeah, the satellite photo is not a Photoshop.
It actually is dark at nightNot someone with a Sharpie
coloring it and it's reallyquite shocking.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
I've heard it said that people in North Korea now
are, on average, three or fourinches shorter than people in
South Korea, and you mentionedin Venezuela the dramatic loss
of average weight of aVenezuelan due to the famines,
the lack of food there.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Yeah, the Venezuelans are short on food, and it's
something like 20, 30 pounds perperson on average.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
And high levels of malnutrition.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Quite literally, the country is not able to provide
enough calories to sustain thebody weight of the population.
It's interesting about Korea,though, is after the Korean War,
you know, the North was richerby a long long shot.
The North was industrialized,it was rich, had big factories,
and the South was the sort ofpoor agrarian part.
(23:23):
And, of course, 50 years, 70years however many years of
socialism has reversed thoseroles.
You know South Korea adoptedsomething like capitalism and
you know Seoul's skyline speaksfor itself and North Korea went
the other way, and those twocountries have reversed.
I've heard Koreans say that inthe very old days, you know,
north Koreans told jokes aboutSouth Koreans how backward they
(23:44):
were, how poor they were, howlazy they were.
And you know the North was theindustrial.
You know innovative, that wasthe more hip place to be in
Korea.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Well, we were pleased that you could join with that
literacy.
Infant mortality, theenvironment all performing so
much better in freer countries.
Do you get much feedback fromthe index and how valuable it is
as a teaching tool?
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Well, first of all, thank you.
Receiving the award was a realhonor, I have to say.
It's embarrassing maybe, but Iwas not fully aware of the
extent to which you all atFoundation for Teaching
Economics have used the index.
It's gratifying for me todiscover that.
I mean, I had a vague sense itwas being used, but the extent
was not well known to me.
I'm an academic, I live in mylittle silo.
(24:56):
I'm happy if I go into theoffice, close the door and spend
my day in spreadsheets.
I'm a weirdo like that.
So it was gratifying to hearthose stories about how much you
guys use the product.
So I live in this sort oflittle weird academic bubble.
When an academic cites my work,I get a notification from
Google, but when you do aworkshop for school teachers
(25:16):
somewhere, I don't get anotification necessarily, and
I'm very happy to have learnedabout you know all the work you
guys are doing with it.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
We have programs in Santiago, chile and in Prague
for students from those regionsof the world, and it's a very
effective tool there when youbring together students from 15
or 20 or 25 countries in theclassroom and they immediately
want to see how their country iscompared to the other countries
of classmates there, and it's agreat tool there too.
(25:44):
Do you find time amidsteverything else you're doing
heading up a center and doingthe index and writing books and
academic papers?
Are you in the classroom aswell?
Speaker 2 (25:53):
I do teach.
As one of my mentors, dwightLee, used to say, I like
teaching a lot.
I just don't like teaching alot, so I do teach.
I would never not want to teach.
Right now, though, I teachexecutive MBAs, which are a very
special kind of group of peopleTeaching basic economics, and
they need it too, and it's veryrewarding.
And, again, I only go into aclassroom, quite honestly, a
(26:19):
handful of days a year, becausethose courses are very
compressed, and maybe in afuture that's yet to be written,
I will get back.
I love teaching undergraduates.
I was good at it.
I don't think I'm that good atteaching executive MBA, so I'm
adequate at it, but I was reallygood at teaching undergrads.
I really enjoyed it, and Iwould hope that, if my life
settles down a little bit andmaybe I move on from this
particular role that I'm in now,which is a very demanding one,
(26:41):
running the institute and allthat, that I get back into the
classroom with undergrads,because their learning curve is
so steep.
With undergrads, you can justsee them like breaking.
Their brains are breaking asyou're speaking to them.
They're just.
You know, they're learning sofast, and it's rewarding as a
teacher to see that so fast andit's rewarding as a teacher to
see that.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Well, since you mentioned Dwight Lee, I joined
him on a panel he organized onceat an Association of Private
Enterprise Educators conferencein all places in Maui I think it
was.
But we did a panel and Dwighttalked about you know how to
improve the teaching ofintroductory economics and
trying to teach it as a course.
That is not the first course astudent's going to take on their
way to a PhD, but likely theone and only economics course.
(27:21):
They'll have to try to givethem that economic way of
thinking in that first courseand I think it would just spark
an interest in moreundergraduates wanting to take
more economics if they had thatkind of course as an
introductory course.
And I'm sure you succeed inteaching it that way and
lighting a spark in the studentswho are in your classroom.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Well, it is a conversation killer when you
tell someone you're an economicsprofessor, because most people
go oh, I hated that.
It's very often taught in avery poor way, very technical
way, very dry, and there's noneed for that.
Dwight was right Very, very,very few One person out of a
thousand of our undergrads aregoing to go get a PhD in
economics.
That's probably too high anumber and yet too often we're
(28:05):
teaching those courses as ifthey're going to become econ
majors or econ professorssomeday, and that's just
ridiculous.
It's not what happens.
That's why I like teaching theUK of MBAs, because I know
they're not going to get a PhDin economics.
They already have careers andso I'm liberated there, even
though they're not as young andthey really do know a lot
already.
But I'm liberated because Idon't need to follow some kind
of a curriculum.
I do what I want and my goalthere is to get them to think
(28:28):
about economics, knowing thatthey're not going to become
economists.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
I've seen statistics in the past of the percentage of
journalists who've takeneconomics is very, very low.
The percentage of members ofCongress who've studied
economics is very, very low andit's reflected in what we see
and hear and what's going on inWashington DC these days.
So fortunately, I think withFTE, our high school programs
(28:53):
really do teach economics inthis activities-based methods
that really spark an interest instudents and the lessons have a
stickiness to them when they dothe trading games and the other
types of activities in theclassroom and look at the Index
of Economic Freedom.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Even like activities.
But I use a lot of multimediavideo clips from movies.
I use some music, lyrics, comicstrips and so forth.
I use that with my executiveMBAs yeah, we do some algebra
and all that too.
But years later they'll come tome and say you know, I remember
that Pretty Woman clip or Iremember that comic strip, and
(29:27):
that method of teaching is thekind of teaching that does work.
It's actually harder to do thatthan it is just to teach out of
the textbook and do the graphsand the math and that's kind of
the easiest path for mostteachers.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
We've had your co-author, ben Powell, teach
courses for us and hopefullywe'll get you a little more
involved in giving guestlectures or teaching with us too
.
But we appreciate all you'redoing there at SMU, and your
book Socialism Sucks toEconomists Drink their Way
Through the Unfree World issomething I highly recommend.
Thank you, bob, for being onthe Liberty and Leadership
(30:03):
podcast today.
Thanks a lot, it was fun.
Thank you for listening to theLiberty and Leadership podcast.
If you have a comment orquestion, please drop us an
email at podcast at tfasorg, andbe sure to subscribe to the
show on your favorite podcastapp and leave a five-star review
.
Liberty and Leadership isproduced at Podville Media.
(30:26):
I'm your host, roger Ream, anduntil next time, show courage in
things, large and small.
Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership podcast,
a conversation with TFAS alumni,faculty and friends who are
making an impact.
Today.
I'm your host, Roger Ream.
Today on Liberty and Leadership, my guest is Robert Lawson,
Director of the BridwellInstitute for Economic Freedom
(00:22):
at Southern Methodist UniversityInstitute for Economic Freedom
at Southern Methodist University.
Bob is also a clinicalprofessor and the Jerome M
Fulenwider Centennial Chair inEconomic Freedom.
Bob is a prolific writer who hasauthored or co-authored over
100 academic publications.
He is the founding co-author ofthe Fraser Institute's Economic
(00:42):
Freedom of the World AnnualReport and he co-wrote with
Benjamin Powell the best-sellingbook Socialism Sucks.
Two Economists Drink their WayThrough the Unfree World.
Bob's accolades include beingsenior fellow at the Fraser
Institute, a member of the MontPelerin Society and the past
(01:02):
president of the Association ofPrivate Enterprise Education,
from whom he received theirprestigious Adam Smith Award.
Bob is also recently therecipient of TFAS's 2025 Gary M
Walton Award for Excellence inEconomic Education, which we
presented to him at our annualconference in Naples, Florida,
(01:23):
this past March.
Bob, welcome to the show.
Hi, Roger, Good to be here.
Well, you know, this book,Socialism Sucks, was published
in 2019, if I'm not mistaken,and it's a great book.
I suspect it's still selling,at least somewhat.
I hope it's something thatcollege professors at least are
giving to students or parentsare buying for young people,
(01:44):
because it has lessons in herethat we certainly need today, in
2025.
Let me begin by just asking youkind of, what was the
motivation or where'd the ideacome to you and to Ben Powell to
take off and travel the worldto see what socialism was really
like?
Speaker 2 (02:00):
It really didn't start out as a socialism book as
such.
It might've been a midlifecrisis.
I'm in my mid-50s, ben's in hismid-40s.
We both checked off a lot ofour career boxes.
You know professors at majoruniversities.
We both run fairly majorinstitutes.
I run the Bridwell Institute,he runs something called the
Free Market Institute at TexasTech and you know one more
(02:20):
journal article doesn't reallyadvance our career that much at
the margin at this point and wehave big travel budgets.
So we're like, you know, let'sgo somewhere.
I wanted to go to Cuba just tosee it, and being professors, it
was easy for us to go.
We don't need any.
You know special requirementsor rules to follow.
But as we were writing itthough, you know, bernie Sanders
(02:41):
became a credible candidate forthe presidency and he calls
himself a socialist.
He usually calls himself ademocratic socialist, to maybe
soften the edge of that word,but he's socialist and AOC had
been elected.
And so we decided, since halfthe countries we were targeting
anyway on this midlife crisis,half of them, were socialists,
we just sort of pivoted the bookto talk about socialism, to
(03:03):
sort of ride the Bernie wave,and one thing led to another,
and there we are.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Since you mentioned Bernie Sanders on your second
chapter I think it is is aboutVenezuela and you quote Bernie
Sanders there, and this is himin 2011.
He writes these days, theAmerican dream is more apt to be
realized in South America, inplaces such as Ecuador,
venezuela and Argentina this wasbefore Malay, of course where
(03:28):
incomes are actually more equaltoday than they are in the land
of Horatio Alger, who's thebanana republic now.
I mean, that is such a tellingquote you found of him.
His measure of success isequality, so in that sense,
venezuela is the socialistparadise.
Everyone's equally destitute,except for the rulers, of course
.
Let's talk about Venezuela.
(03:49):
You found equality there.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
I guess Everyone was in the same situation trying to
get across to Colombia to buyfood in the sense that rich and
poor alike were walking acrossthe border to go shopping,
because on the Venezuelan sidethere were massive and there
still are massive shortages ofbasic items aspirin, deodorant,
(04:14):
rice, beans, diapers forchildren, everything.
And so we saw peasants, peoplewho were clearly very, very poor
, walking across the border tobuy things.
And we saw well-dressed,well-mannered, clearly not
peasant Venezuelans who werealso crossing the border.
So there was a sort of equalityof misery and equality of
(04:35):
shortage.
The people we talked to at theborder it was Ana and Paulo Ana
Maria and Paulo and they hadcome three days.
One way They'd driven fromCiudad Bolivar, which is on the
far other side of Venezuela, sothey basically crossed the
entire country to come to theColombian border to go grocery
shopping.
And they were middle-classpeople.
(04:56):
Paulo had a little English, heworked in a hotel.
I mean again, these were notpeasants.
I don't want to make light ofpoverty, but when poor people by
necessity do crazy things likewalk great distances for water,
for food, but when you see asociety where even the sort of
middle and upper class that was,when you know this was a
societal level breakdown, Let meask when you went I know in
(05:18):
Venezuela you were able to goacross the border briefly you
had to be a little careful,since you had families back home
you wanted to get home to InCuba.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Did you sense you had handlers who were monitoring
where you went and what you didand who you talked to?
Speaker 2 (05:33):
No, not, obviously.
And again, we didn't sign upfor one of the friends to
friends or whatever they callthem, tours, and if you do that
you're going to have a handlerthrough your trip.
We just got on a charter planeand at this time it was relaxing
a little bit.
You could fly on a charter, nota commercial like scheduled
airline, but you could get on acharter.
It was actually operated byAmerican Airlines, but we flew
(05:55):
from Miami to Cuba, just asprivate individuals had
organized visas ahead of timethe usual drill.
But we got there and we werecompletely unscheduled.
We didn't even know ourselveswhere we were going half the
time.
We were deliberately doing itthat way.
We wanted to get a sort of morerealistic view I mean as
realistic as two sort of richobviously not Cuban Americans
(06:15):
can.
I mean we're never going to geta full picture as visitors of
what it's like to live there.
So we, you know, we ended upstaying in sort of off the
beaten path hotels, which werehorrible, and ended up spending
most of our time in parts ofHavana and parts of the island
that tourists would nottypically go to.
We didn't have a realinterpreter there.
(06:35):
My Spanish is pretty muchrestaurant.
Spanish and English on Cuba isnot as prevalent as it would, be
say, in most of Latin America,but still we were able to talk
to people and I didn't get muchsense of guardedness from them.
But again, I wasn't able toreally have deep conversations
either.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
A colleague of mine visited Cuba part of one of
those educationalfriend-to-friend tours a few
years before you did, and onestory she brought back was being
taken to a school to beimpressed with how high tech it
was.
And they walked into thecomputer room and there were all
these young kids in there oncomputers and she noticed they
(07:15):
were all using just their indexfingers to type.
So it appeared that this mayhave been the first day they
were ever on the computer, thatthey were brought into this
classroom to impress theseAmericans about how high tech
the schools were.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
There was one anecdote and in retrospect it
occurred to me he might havebeen a plant or somebody, but we
were walking up the steps atthe old, glorious well, it's
decrepit now, but the gloriousUniversity of Havana, and
beautiful, you know colonialarchitecture.
And we're walking up the stairs.
And again, beautiful, you knowcolonial architecture.
And we're walking up the stairs.
(07:47):
And again, we're clearly notCuban by our dress and
everything.
And this young man is 20something year old.
I was walking down and just ashe passed us on the steps he
turned around and says hey, inperfect English.
And again, that was unusual.
He said where are you guys from?
And you know I said Los EstadosUnidos and we had a nice
conversation.
This was again right after somerelaxation.
President Obama had come andvisited the island for the first
(08:09):
time and a president do thatforever now and there was some
falling in relations.
And the kid said I'm not makingthis up.
He said to us as we wereleaving, he said we're so happy
you Americans are coming becauseyou bring us more freedom.
He actually said that and ofcourse I get chills when I tell
(08:30):
the story now.
We thought he was going to saywe're happy you're bringing more
money, and I wouldn't haveblamed him for that view.
I mean, we all like money buthe understood that the thawing
of relations between the twocountries was likely to bring
freedom to Cuba as well astourist dollars.
And we were stupid we're notactual journalists, you know and
we just said, all right, seeyou man.
And we let him go and we shouldhave invited him to dinner
because he could have told us alot.
But it did occur to me thatmaybe he was some sort of spy
(08:53):
that you know.
But I don't think so.
I didn't get that, you know atall.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
One thing that's noteworthy, and you touch on it
too is, you know, in Venezuela Itouch on it too is you know in
Venezuela?
I don't know what the number isnow I think in your book you
say three or four million peoplehave fled the country.
Cuba, of course, has had anexodus by boat and by any means
possible, north Korea.
People who are able to get out,it's at great risk to their
(09:18):
lives and not many do make it,but some do you know.
This evidence is that socialismis just terrible for human
beings.
It destroys countries,economies and life itself.
And yet you know you have lotsof people advocating socialism
and you, in fact, at the end ofthe book you talk about going to
a socialist convention inChicago.
(09:39):
I think it is, but what's yourconclusion there?
Is it that economists don't doan adequate job explaining it?
Why is it that socialism's yourconclusion there?
Is it that economists don't doan adequate job explaining it?
Why is it that socialism stillhas this appeal?
Or people just don't associatesocialism with the evils of
these places?
Speaker 2 (09:53):
There are some evil people in the socialist movement
, but I generally don't thinkthat we can just attribute this
to pure evil.
I mean there is injustice inthe world.
I mean people do see poverty tobe an injustice.
To an extent, inequality peoplesee as an injustice and racism,
sexism.
There's a whole bunch of thingsthat are just bad in our world
(10:16):
and many people are deeplyconcerned and care about that.
And socialists are selling thisutopic vision, this gloriously
well-lit future that's going toget rid of sexism and it's going
to get rid of inequality andwhatever injustice is bothering
you.
The socialists are going topromise to fix it and it's very
intoxicating, particularly whenyou're young, to latch onto that
.
Now.
Analytically, socialism,meaning the collective control
(10:39):
of resources in the hands of acentral planner that economic
system is a failure.
Empirically it's a failure, asyou know.
It's also a theoretical failure.
One of the sayings sometimesyou'll hear Marxists or socials
say is you know, it's good intheory, but maybe it doesn't
work in practice.
Well, no, it's actually notgood in theory either.
The problem is the theory ishard Understanding the
(10:59):
intricacies of why prices set bymarkets are better than prices
set by bureaucrats.
I'm just saying that isactually analytically
challenging and it's notsomething that a lot of people
are going to get.
I think that's the main thingis just this sort of
intoxicating snake oil that theysell and it does make you feel
good for a while, maybe.
I mean snake oil usually wasbasically alcohol, and it makes
(11:20):
you feel good for a minute andit doesn't cure the disease.
In fact, taking too much it canmake it worse.
So I think that's the mainissue.
When we were at the socialismconference in Chicago, I took
that to be an optimistic spin inthe sense that they weren't
literally interested inmurdering people, which is the
fact of the matter is, socialismhas resulted in the direct
(11:41):
murder of millions, tens ofmillions of people in different
places.
They weren't for that, theyweren't just pure evil.
The challenge for us is how dowe communicate that?
And one of the things that thereason we wrote this book, which
is a little bit of a man on thestreet, a little bit of a you
know two middle-aged broscarousing, drinking too much
beer and so forth was to try totell that story in a way that's
(12:05):
different than the normal wayeconomists tell it.
You know, I've got books.
I've got, you know, stacks ofjournal articles that no one's
read, and so we figured, ifwe're going to try to
communicate to the sort ofBernie bros of the world, we
needed to do it with a vehiclethat was going to be more
approachable to them.
There is another dimension, andthat is our side.
By that I mean sort of thepeople that believe in private
(12:26):
property and markets and freedomof exchange and so forth.
We're selling hard medicine.
It actually is medicine thatwill cure a lot of those
diseases, but they're nevergoing to go away.
We're never going to get rid ofracism, sexism, completely
probably, and a lot of timesthat we're selling like, hey,
you need to take this medicine,you need to take this free trade
medicine and it's going to makeyou better in the future, but
(12:48):
right now it feels painful andthat's bad politics, it's just
bad marketing in a lot of ways.
But we're right, our medicinedoes cure.
It helps the patient.
Socialism is a tonic that makesyou feel good in the short run
but hurts you in the long run.
Our medicine does the reverse.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
I recall Hayek, in something he wrote, suggested
that something along the linesthat you were saying.
That came to my mind that theadvocates for the free society
need a utopian vision.
We don't have that.
We're competing against theutopian vision and we're lacking
that in what we do.
And he wrote that years ago andperhaps we have that to some
(13:24):
extent in talking about thegreat enrichment that took place
and the billions of peoplelifted out of poverty through
prices and property rights andmarkets.
But I think you're ontosomething there.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Yeah, but our future is an open-ended one.
Liberalism, and again in theoriginal sense of that word, is
an open-ended future.
It's not an end point, I guess.
Yeah, it's also what you decide.
It's what the person next toyou decides their future is.
And we're letting you decidewhat utopia you want to build
with your friends, neighbors,family, you know, and so forth,
whereas the socialists, they'vegot a vision, they've
(13:58):
preordained what they think isgoing to happen.
We're sort of saying well,trust us, the future is going to
be great, but you have to trustus.
Well, and someone asked what'sthe future going to look like?
We're like well, that's for youto decide.
Again, it's not very easy tosell that product, I think.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
In your first chapter , you and Ben Powell visit
Sweden, which is often pointedto by people such as Bernie
Sanders and others as thesocialism they're talking about,
though you found that quotewhere he actually says Venezuela
, ecuador, is the model.
But what did you find when youwent to the Scandinavian
countries, particularly inSweden?
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Well, we found good beer and that was our first tell
that it wasn't socialist.
The beer was expensive and, asyou know, sweden has very high
taxes.
It's a very large, fiscal,large government.
They tax and spend a lot.
But if you look at thestructure of the Swedish economy
, it's in no way, shape or formsocialist Socialism and we
define this at the beginning ofthe book to make sure everyone's
(14:52):
on the same page.
It's defined as a collectivecontrol of resources, the means
of production, the factories,the farms, the workers, that
there's a collective control ofthose things.
In a sense there's going to bea central plan and for large
societies that has always meantthe state.
The state is going to be thecentral planner for how the
(15:13):
economy runs.
And the Swedish economy has abig government.
But those bureaucrats inStockholm don't run the economy.
Volvo is a famous Swedish firm.
They're a completely privatecompany.
Their stock trades on stockexchanges.
The workers go home toprivately owned homes and flats
and apartments and whatever, andthey drive private cars.
(15:34):
There's no major system ofallocating, picking you off the
street and say well, you'regoing to be an engineer, you're
going to be a mathematician,you're going to be a taxi car
driver.
People get to decide their ownoccupations in a pretty open
labor market.
So the Swedish economy isstructurally very much like ours
.
Sure, they have a biggovernment, but people are quite
free to choose their ownoccupations, their own lines of
(15:56):
work, paint their houses the waythey want to paint them.
Again, there's probably ruleson that.
But Swedish farmers and Swedishfishermen own their own fish.
They decide if they go outTuesday or Wednesday, and all of
that.
There's no central plan.
And that's the differencebetween, say, cuba and Sweden,
where in Cuba there's a centralplan, like the restaurants, the
farms, the factories, thefishing fleets, everything is
(16:20):
owned by the government andaligned with some kind of plan
that the bureaucrats in Havanahave written down on paper.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
You also, as I mentioned, produce the Index of
Economic Freedom with the FraserInstitute each year.
Where does a country likeSweden rank, and do you recall
where it ranks in your latestranking?
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Yeah sure.
So my day job, so to speak,isn't to travel the country and
drink beer with Ben, as fun asthat was is to be a professor,
and the research product I workon is the Economic Freedom of
the World Index, and we rate andrank countries for the degree
to which they're following sortof free market principles.
The first country in the listis Hong Kong, and like Singapore
(17:00):
, and then the last one isVenezuela.
Venezuela was dead last.
So Sweden.
As a matter of fact, when wewrote the book they were in the
high 20s.
I think they dropped to the 30s, but they're out of 165
countries that we score, Swedenis in the upper quarter of the
rankings.
It's much closer to free marketHong Kong or United States,
let's say than they areVenezuela.
(17:21):
Venezuela is hard socialism now.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Where'd the US rank in the latest ranking?
Speaker 2 (17:27):
We're fifth in the last rankings and we've been in
the sort of top 10.
We used to be third.
It was for decades of doingthis project.
The US was always third andthen we've dropped considerably
in terms of the number and theranking a little bit over the
last, say, two decades.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Have you given any thought to whether Hong Kong
would belong in there as anindependent country, now that
China's exerted so much controlover it?
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Well, we have.
So long as data are available,I'm going to continue to rate
Hong Kong.
That's my position and I wantto sort of document the decline
of freedom.
To be fair, most of the freedomdeclining there has been on the
political and civil libertiesside of things and we're not
measuring that in our index.
If you think about taxes andtariffs and basic property
(18:11):
rights, you know real estatetransactions and such.
That system has not changed alot in Hong Kong.
We do measure property rightsand rule of law in a broader
sense as well and Hong Kong'snumbers have gone down.
But they were very much infirst and now they're only
slightly in first.
I mean the tail's long.
Their score has dropped almostmore than any country in the
(18:31):
world.
They just went from reallyfirst to sort of just sort of
first.
One year in the index Singaporedid pass them.
They've been basically tied,statistically tied for the last
year.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
And I know there's a lag in terms of getting
statistics and your rating thatcomes out each year.
Just a thought and aside isgood luck trying to figure out
how you evaluate the US thisyear in terms of tariffs,
because they seem to change fromweek to week to week.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Well, I've done a little bit of an exercise.
We do lag a couple of years.
It takes a year for the data toget collected by the agencies
that collect it and then maybeanother year for us to get it
from them and process and such.
So you know, here is 2025.
I won't really have a numberfor the US until 2027.
With that said, you can do someback of the envelope
projections, sort of holdingeverything else equal With
(19:20):
respect to the biggest economicissue of the day tariffs.
Right now in the tariff we havea component for tariffs.
It measures tariffs in threedifferent ways but that
particular component the USranks 52nd out of 165.
So by no means are we very freemarket now.
We're not like that's a fewyears ago, right, yeah, that's
from 2023.
(19:41):
We project I mean, if thetariffs that Trump has outlined
now pass and stick, we'repredicting we would go from 50th
to somewhere in the 70s.
So we'll go from like uppermiddle to about basically middle
.
So it'll move us further awayfrom the free trade direction.
You know there's a lot ofcountries that are very
restrictive.
You know Iran and many of thesesuch countries.
(20:03):
So it'll take a hit.
The US score will take a hitOverall.
That effect probably lowers usfrom I said fifth.
I got them going to about 10thoverall based on these tariff
moves.
So it's not going to make usVenezuela right, but it's
definitely not going to move usup in the scores.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
I should mention we're recording this on May 6th,
so when Bob says if the tariffsare what they are today,
because they may be differenttomorrow or next week.
So, getting back to your book,you didn't visit North Korea but
you have a chapter on NorthKorea.
Could you talk about yourapproach to that country?
Since it's closed off?
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Well, we went to South Korea, went to Seoul and
did the usual DMZ tour.
That was kind of a tourist trap, but we kind of did the same
thing we did in Venezuela.
It was more interesting to goto the Colombian-Venezuela
border.
Likewise, we went to thenorthern North Korea border, the
southern China border, theborder with China.
It was a major city on theChinese side called Dandong.
It's a big city.
(21:00):
I mean, you've never heard ofit, probably, but like it's got
9 million people.
We would consider it likeDallas, fort Worth.
So it's a huge city, right thereon the border of North Korea,
on the old Yalu River, if youremember your Korean War history
and across the river is a major.
I forget the name of the cityon the North Korean side, but
it's hundreds of thousands ofpeople.
And one of the interestingthings is when we got there at
(21:21):
night we had an evening flightto arrive and we took a taxi to
our hotel right on the river andwe look across the river and
it's just utter darkness acrossthe river.
There were a couple pinpointpricks of light and then you
wake up in the morning and youlook across the river and there
is hundreds of thousands ofpeople.
It's a major city in NorthKorea, Mid-rise buildings, no
(21:42):
high rises like they have on theChinese side, so absolute
darkness.
People over there living inmedieval conditions.
We saw a guy using a tractor.
The tractor I could hear it,even though it was across the
river.
It was hundreds of meters awaybut I could hear it.
And it was his old dieseltractor, with that low thump,
thump, thump, low RPM dieseltractor and he had a very small
(22:03):
hill.
He was trying to get up.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
And.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
I felt so sorry for him, but he just, the tractor,
just couldn't do it, it just,and eventually he gave up and I
saw the.
But most of the people wereusing animals to pull plows and
things of that sort.
So when I say medieval, I meanit quite literally.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Yeah, so that view you had across the river at
night is similar to thatsatellite photo that is often
shown in presentations of theKorean peninsula at night.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Yeah, the satellite photo is not a Photoshop.
It actually is dark at nightNot someone with a Sharpie
coloring it and it's reallyquite shocking.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
I've heard it said that people in North Korea now
are, on average, three or fourinches shorter than people in
South Korea, and you mentionedin Venezuela the dramatic loss
of average weight of aVenezuelan due to the famines,
the lack of food there.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Yeah, the Venezuelans are short on food, and it's
something like 20, 30 pounds perperson on average.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
And high levels of malnutrition.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Quite literally, the country is not able to provide
enough calories to sustain thebody weight of the population.
It's interesting about Korea,though, is after the Korean War,
you know, the North was richerby a long long shot.
The North was industrialized,it was rich, had big factories,
and the South was the sort ofpoor agrarian part.
(23:23):
And, of course, 50 years, 70years however many years of
socialism has reversed thoseroles.
You know South Korea adoptedsomething like capitalism and
you know Seoul's skyline speaksfor itself and North Korea went
the other way, and those twocountries have reversed.
I've heard Koreans say that inthe very old days, you know,
north Koreans told jokes aboutSouth Koreans how backward they
(23:44):
were, how poor they were, howlazy they were.
And you know the North was theindustrial.
You know innovative, that wasthe more hip place to be in
Korea.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Well, we were pleased that you could join with that
literacy.
Infant mortality, theenvironment all performing so
much better in freer countries.
Do you get much feedback fromthe index and how valuable it is
as a teaching tool?
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Well, first of all, thank you.
Receiving the award was a realhonor, I have to say.
It's embarrassing maybe, but Iwas not fully aware of the
extent to which you all atFoundation for Teaching
Economics have used the index.
It's gratifying for me todiscover that.
I mean, I had a vague sense itwas being used, but the extent
was not well known to me.
I'm an academic, I live in mylittle silo.
(24:56):
I'm happy if I go into theoffice, close the door and spend
my day in spreadsheets.
I'm a weirdo like that.
So it was gratifying to hearthose stories about how much you
guys use the product.
So I live in this sort oflittle weird academic bubble.
When an academic cites my work,I get a notification from
Google, but when you do aworkshop for school teachers
(25:16):
somewhere, I don't get anotification necessarily, and
I'm very happy to have learnedabout you know all the work you
guys are doing with it.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
We have programs in Santiago, chile and in Prague
for students from those regionsof the world, and it's a very
effective tool there when youbring together students from 15
or 20 or 25 countries in theclassroom and they immediately
want to see how their country iscompared to the other countries
of classmates there, and it's agreat tool there too.
(25:44):
Do you find time amidsteverything else you're doing
heading up a center and doingthe index and writing books and
academic papers?
Are you in the classroom aswell?
Speaker 2 (25:53):
I do teach.
As one of my mentors, dwightLee, used to say, I like
teaching a lot.
I just don't like teaching alot, so I do teach.
I would never not want to teach.
Right now, though, I teachexecutive MBAs, which are a very
special kind of group of peopleTeaching basic economics, and
they need it too, and it's veryrewarding.
And, again, I only go into aclassroom, quite honestly, a
(26:19):
handful of days a year, becausethose courses are very
compressed, and maybe in afuture that's yet to be written,
I will get back.
I love teaching undergraduates.
I was good at it.
I don't think I'm that good atteaching executive MBA, so I'm
adequate at it, but I was reallygood at teaching undergrads.
I really enjoyed it, and Iwould hope that, if my life
settles down a little bit andmaybe I move on from this
particular role that I'm in now,which is a very demanding one,
(26:41):
running the institute and allthat, that I get back into the
classroom with undergrads,because their learning curve is
so steep.
With undergrads, you can justsee them like breaking.
Their brains are breaking asyou're speaking to them.
They're just.
You know, they're learning sofast, and it's rewarding as a
teacher to see that so fast andit's rewarding as a teacher to
see that.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Well, since you mentioned Dwight Lee, I joined
him on a panel he organized onceat an Association of Private
Enterprise Educators conferencein all places in Maui I think it
was.
But we did a panel and Dwighttalked about you know how to
improve the teaching ofintroductory economics and
trying to teach it as a course.
That is not the first course astudent's going to take on their
way to a PhD, but likely theone and only economics course.
(27:21):
They'll have to try to givethem that economic way of
thinking in that first courseand I think it would just spark
an interest in moreundergraduates wanting to take
more economics if they had thatkind of course as an
introductory course.
And I'm sure you succeed inteaching it that way and
lighting a spark in the studentswho are in your classroom.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Well, it is a conversation killer when you
tell someone you're an economicsprofessor, because most people
go oh, I hated that.
It's very often taught in avery poor way, very technical
way, very dry, and there's noneed for that.
Dwight was right Very, very,very few One person out of a
thousand of our undergrads aregoing to go get a PhD in
economics.
That's probably too high anumber and yet too often we're
(28:05):
teaching those courses as ifthey're going to become econ
majors or econ professorssomeday, and that's just
ridiculous.
It's not what happens.
That's why I like teaching theUK of MBAs, because I know
they're not going to get a PhDin economics.
They already have careers andso I'm liberated there, even
though they're not as young andthey really do know a lot
already.
But I'm liberated because Idon't need to follow some kind
of a curriculum.
I do what I want and my goalthere is to get them to think
(28:28):
about economics, knowing thatthey're not going to become
economists.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
I've seen statistics in the past of the percentage of
journalists who've takeneconomics is very, very low.
The percentage of members ofCongress who've studied
economics is very, very low andit's reflected in what we see
and hear and what's going on inWashington DC these days.
So fortunately, I think withFTE, our high school programs
(28:53):
really do teach economics inthis activities-based methods
that really spark an interest instudents and the lessons have a
stickiness to them when they dothe trading games and the other
types of activities in theclassroom and look at the Index
of Economic Freedom.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Even like activities.
But I use a lot of multimediavideo clips from movies.
I use some music, lyrics, comicstrips and so forth.
I use that with my executiveMBAs yeah, we do some algebra
and all that too.
But years later they'll come tome and say you know, I remember
that Pretty Woman clip or Iremember that comic strip, and
(29:27):
that method of teaching is thekind of teaching that does work.
It's actually harder to do thatthan it is just to teach out of
the textbook and do the graphsand the math and that's kind of
the easiest path for mostteachers.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
We've had your co-author, ben Powell, teach
courses for us and hopefullywe'll get you a little more
involved in giving guestlectures or teaching with us too
.
But we appreciate all you'redoing there at SMU, and your
book Socialism Sucks toEconomists Drink their Way
Through the Unfree World issomething I highly recommend.
Thank you, bob, for being onthe Liberty and Leadership
(30:03):
podcast today.
Thanks a lot, it was fun.
Thank you for listening to theLiberty and Leadership podcast.
If you have a comment orquestion, please drop us an
email at podcast at tfasorg, andbe sure to subscribe to the
show on your favorite podcastapp and leave a five-star review
.
Liberty and Leadership isproduced at Podville Media.
(30:26):
I'm your host, roger Ream, anduntil next time, show courage in
things, large and small.
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