?? Who is handling this virus the best? - Prof Steve Keen

Wednesday 1st April 2020

Italy is getting swamped in corona virus cases, whilst China claims the only new infections now come from visitors from overseas. Donald Trump has gone from calling it a hoax to warning that 200 thousand Americans dying will be the best possible scenario. The UK has seen its death rate step up again today, whilst Germany has seen relatively few deaths and in Sweden folks are still eating out at restaurants. In this FREE edition of the Debunking Economics podcast, Phil Dobbie asks Prof Steve Keen which countries are handling the crisis the best, not just to contain the spread, but also to prepare their economy for the recovery.

TRANSCRIPT

PHIL DOBBIE [00:00:01] Well, whilst COVID19 isn't particularly good news anywhere in the world, we are starting to see big discrepancies between those countries which have been hit hard and those that seem to have escaped the worst of it. Why is that? And when it's all over, will we find a similar discrepancy between those who bounce back relatively quickly and those economies who suffer the consequences of the current downturn for many years to come today. Which economy is handling the virus the best? I'm Phil Dobbie. Welcome to the Debunking Economics podcast with Professor Steve Keen.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:00:36] Well, in the U.S., we know that at least three million people lost their job in a week, a couple of weeks back. So we wait this week for the updated figures, but we know it's going to be a lot more than that. And of course, most of those people will lose their private health cover that came with their jobs just as they need it. In the UK there are very tame predictions that unemployment will reach 8 percent, which is double what it was in the three months to January. Australia, I suspect, is just at the beginning of the journey, but the economy is pretty much locked down there as well. So layoffs will follow as product productivity decreases, well ... as production disappears? Just how bad is this going to be? Steve, how bad do you reckon? And is the ensuing unemployment rate the big issue? Because that's, of course, what is going to stop a big bounce back if people have lost their jobs. They've got to find jobs. That could be a very long and tortuous process. And I imagine that's a key number isn't it?

STEVE KEEN [00:01:31] This is actually one of those chicken and egg questions, which comes first, the supply or demand. And the answer in a monetary economy is the demand comes first. This, as I say, is law in reverse. Demand creates its own supply fundamentally.

STEVE KEEN [00:01:43] Now, if you have something of the order - and it's quite likely to get this high - 30 percent of the population out of a job. Then you're going to rely on on there on the remaining 70 percent of the workforce, providing additional demand is slowly stimulates those people back into work. It isn't going to work. This is one of those real cases where, you know, you've got an engine and you got to kick start it, frankly. And the kick start's the the government, just like the government needs to be the the provider of last resort. And when we actually have to shut capitalism down to withdraw the lockdowns we're doing so to prevent this virus spreading even more rapidly. We need to go in. We need demand to come in and rapidly from the government sector. If, it doesn't. We're in for a long extended depression.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:02:28] Well, it seems like there's two ways you can do that. One is the way that's being taken in Ireland and Australia and the U.K., where they are trying to stop companies laying people off. So if they are proroguing workers, they're basically saying, well, we're going to cover up a portion of your pay on the basis then that those workers will still be employed by you. You can turn the switch factories, or whatever it is you do, will start working again. And all is good. That's very different to the approach taken in the United States, where they're basically just saying, well, no, let's let's do the helicopter money approach. Not enough of it, but let's give money to everybody. Put it into their bank accounts. There's actually no incentive for companies to hang onto people, which is why we saw that 3 million increase in a week, a couple of weeks back.

STEVE KEEN [00:03:10] You need both. I mean, you've got to you've got to provide money to people so they can pay their fundamental bills.

[00:03:14] I actually, as you know, one of our earlier podcast and one earlier post on the site as well, I argued in favour of a modern jubilee and that really says "direct payments for everybody so they can pay all this and meet all their financial commitments". So even though they've been they've lost their employment, it's also necessary for people not to lose their jobs. I think it was Jane Caro that made this analogy. You're going to intensive care. This is not hibernation. The hibernating bear that has built up fat before that, before it goes into hibernation and voluntarily goes into hibernation, leaves out of fat while sleeping and comes up trim and ready to eat the next meal. This is not anything like that. This is intensive care, you are putting into an induced coma. On the other side of the coma you want as little damage as possible done to the actual body, corporate as the economy. And that means you have to say people keep their job. Nobody gets sacked.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:04:12] Right. And that Ireland, Australia, the UK, and I'm sure there are other countries are trying that approach, aren't they? Perhaps countries didn't respond fast enough, but this came from from nowhere and we clearly weren't prepared. But you'd have to say, for capitalist economies to respond in a way where they're starting to pay people now not to work, is it is a big shift in thinking. And it seems to have happened relatively quickly. So we've got to take some some light from that.

STEVE KEEN [00:04:41] We do. But at the same time, this is repeated the same thing with the financial crisis. I mean, you know, I don't have to explain to you that I was warning about the crisis before it happened. I was haranguing you about it. I saw this coming as of December about 18, 2005.

STEVE KEEN [00:05:05] Now, at the same time, you had people like Ben Bernanke's saying everything's absolutely fantastic. And the Fed prediction, the Federal Reserve, 2008 was gonna be a fabulous year with all basically telling politicians to sit back and take the credit for a great year and wham, 2007 August strikes. And we have the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. And in that situation, the response of the so-called authority, the people supposedly charged with place was, and this is pretty much quoting, Hank Paulson, the then U.S. treasury secretary - he said, we didn't want capitalism to fail on our watch. These bastards didn't see it coming. But when it hit, holy hell. Panic. And they did the exact opposite of everything that their training and then their bias and class interests had told them to do beforehand. This is similar.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:05:55] So how do we be like that hibernating bear? In future, how do we have that fat so that we can get through things like this? Is it even possible to do that?

STEVE KEEN [00:06:08] Yes, it is possible, but it's the opposite of what's likely to happen again. I mean,thank God the Germans are stupid enough to put their heads up and say something as ridiculous as this before you even get through the crisis, I've forgotten which particular German leader it was, that came out with a statement about a week ago saying that a sentence this is we've got to return to austerity. No, you don't!

STEVE KEEN [00:06:26] Austerity is a starving bear going into hibernation. The whole idea that governments should be saving money rather than building resources for a rainy day is nonsense. It's the resources you need, not the bloody money they can create with the flick of a switch.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:06:44] Well, very easy for Germany to say that, of course, because they haven't got the same death rate that we're seeing in other parts of Europe. But we'll talk in the next podcast actually about the future of the EU out of all of this. But Donald Trump is wanting to push ahead with his infrastructure project, SO as well as all the money he's he's pushed forward, which is a sizeable proportion of GDP, which is is now coming from from government funds, he's now also wanting to spend two trillion dollars on his infrastructure project, which he's been pushing since he got into power. But he's now saying zero percent interest. Now now's the time to borrow all this money. New Zealand also want to do that - shovel ready projects, they're saying, so people can get into work straight away. So is that is that sensible?

STEVE KEEN [00:07:27] Yes.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:07:28] But who takes up the shovel? Are you ready to take up a shovel, Steve?

STEVE KEEN [00:07:32] Not with my arthritic hands. No,.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:07:35] That's sort of the point. You've got to have the right people in the right job.

STEVE KEEN [00:07:38] So that's why, for example, sacking 80 percent of the staff of the of the of the pandemic staff of the Centre for Disease Control wasn't the brightest of ideas that he had about a year and a half ago. You know, so they're just trimming the fat stuff. There's no such thing as a thin bear going into hibernation. A thin bear going to hibernation is a dead bear.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:07:59] So is there any country can look at and say they've handled this particularly well?

STEVE KEEN [00:08:05] Yes, in fact, the one that I'm currently in Thailand is one that I think can make a fairly strong claim on that front. And also I think Taiwan can make a strong claim. Singapore. A lot of a lot of this country have one thing in common. Their experience, size and they're Asian. And and this was a major factor. They knew that they had to have, for example, the capacity to produce and N95 masks en masse.

STEVE KEEN [00:08:30] And just to give you an idea of my daily, daily routine over here in Thailand, it starts with 10 o'clock going to one of the local bulk food outlets and wearing a mask, standing in a line of a whole lot of other people also wearing masks, and buying for masks for the princely sum of 10 baht, which for those who don't speak Thai is fifty US cents. And that'll, by the way, that is a government mandated price and it includes a 20 percent mark-up profit for the firms making the masks. So, it just shows that an orchestrated part private, part government sector response can work dramatically well and slow down the spread of the disease. And that's why the countries that are actually closest to China physically, are the ones with the best performers right now. Whereas the Europeans, the Americans, total disaster.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:09:18] There are several elements to this aren't there? One is you've got to protect yourself and have masks. And obviously we've got the issue in the UK where there's not enough of that basic stuff even for health care workers who really are on the frontline. But the other one is this this question of of isolation, so that you're not seeing the infection spreading. And I'm sort of surmising that in Asia, they might have been swifter to respond to that as well by stopping movement between countries and within countries.

STEVE KEEN [00:09:44] Oh, yeah, absolutely. China. Pundits will criticize a particular country, 'its political system led to this decision', and then do precisely the same bloody thing with a different political system shortly after. So China denied there was any problem, suppressed the group of doctors who were actually warning about the outbreak of a new form of pneumonia and did everything it could to pretend it wasn't happening. And then once they realised it was happening, it hit the screws in terms of people's capacity to go out into the public in a dramatic way. Now, America, what do they do? It's gonna be all over in two weeks. Only fifteen cases, the absolute same garbage. But they didn't do the follow up that was done by the by the Chinese, which is a total lockdown. And the lockdown has been dramatically effective.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:10:34] So the logic to me and I think this is now being accepted as the general logic for all of this - lockdown everybody so youstop the infection, test people so you can see who's got it. And be sure that we know that once you've had it, you're immune - the scientists stil aren't agreed on that. But if we know that, then those people can gradually get to work. But we will still need to ensure that we have borders control, because, if we're controlling within our country, we need to make sure people coming into our country are following the same approach as well. You can see that as a logical way out of this. I'm just wondering how many countries are going to follow that and follow that approach? I suspect in Asia, more so than perhaps in the West.

STEVE KEEN [00:11:18] And it is partly the state corporate capitalist culture of Asia is coming to its rescue.

STEVE KEEN [00:11:26]  I saw one of my patrons was worried about me that would apparently supporting a totalitarian regime over this particular comment. Hi Stephanos! What I said, in fact, was that China, Xi, will use this to legitimize his own rule. But the combined corporate and statist system that exists generally throughout Asia. Marx actually referred to Asia is as it being irrigation capitalism and needing a centralised state to control the irrigation. So it goes right back, well before the communist period. If you're going to have a country running predominantly on irrigation, you needed organisation to link things together. And there was an acceptance of a state having a powerful role. The Chinese Communist Party was probably pushed that further, than even under the emperors. But it's said that's why successful people have accepted this culturally for a long, long time.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:12:24] Well, this difference between cultures is interesting, isn't it? Because in the US there was this denial for a long time. And I think that still is reading some shocking articles from the US, but also from Australia as well, where denial is still rampant about how far this thing can spread and "it's not going to hit us as much as it's hitting anywhere else".  In Asia, yes, there's a more government down approach, where people do what they're told. In the UK, they don't do that. So they needed more enforcement before it worked. In Sweden, we're told, they've got a more laissez faire approach, they say, because people are voluntarily socially distancing. And the the incline rate for infections and morbidity is much less there than the rest of Europe, although you could argue, perhaps the little less connected being gets stuck up on that on that peninsula that we don't go to unless we're going there. So, I mean, maybe that geography might be part of it as well. But it's showing the difference in cultures, isn't it? Those countries that are less willing to be controlled, right now are the ones that are suffering the most.

STEVE KEEN [00:13:34] Yeah. Look, I'll go back to China again because I was very lucky to have had a very odd experience of China in December and November of 1981. I suggested the concept of a seminar between Australian journalists and those of any other country, to compare coverage over a year to see how much the issues behind the events were being covered by the respective media. And that was picked up by Jocelyn Shay, who was then the director of the Australia China Council. And at that time, they were having discussions with the All Chinese Journalists Association. And they rapidly agreed to the idea of running a seminar between Australian and Chinese journalists. And I ran that seminar in November of 1981. Now, as part of that, we did a tour of China. And, before we before we left the country, there were two pieces of economic data submitted. Me and nine Australian journalists who came along, including the son of Manning Clark, Andrew Clark and a few other fairly prominent Australian journalists. And before we left we did a caucus of our group of nine, and we were stunned by a piece of data coming out of China saying that light industry production had increased by 17 per cent and heavy industry had fallen by 8 per cent. And it just did not compute. You need heavy industry to produce light. How the hell did one go up in the other go down so much? We went through all through China asking all sorts of questions, including coming back to this one all the time. Every question we ever asked was answered by, "we followed the directive of the Central Committee, the Communist Party of China". Absolutely every question. What did you have for breakfast? "I followed the director of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China".

STEVE KEEN [00:15:18] What that meant was - and I finally worked at the logic of this out - was that the Communist Party, that stage with 30 million people out of the country of 1 billion people. So roughly one in every 30 people was a member of the Communist Party. You didn't know who it was.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:15:30] You were being watched.

STEVE KEEN [00:15:30] You were being watched. And the only way to make sure that you didn't get persecuted when things went wrong, as they inevitably would, was to say, I followed the directors of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. Now what meant was a slogan which start at the top level of the country and percolate down through the command system, down to the region. A slogan might be, for example, on this was a common issue back then, the dominant faction Communist Party would be the pro-grain faction. So promote grain. That would get down to the ground level. What would happen? The local communist official would tell the peasants to rip up a legume crops, all the protein stuff, and plant grain. One or two years later, kids be born with protein deficiency disease. And I've actually seen this. I saw kids and these weird faces. And I said, this is Kwashiorkor. And it was. There would then be a revolt. The peasant would knofe the local communist official. It'd go back up the command chain - the peasants are revolting. So they'd promote legumes. That would come down. What did they'd do. They'd rip up grain.

STEVE KEEN [00:16:33] So this is a long, long prelude, but the punchline is, we asked why did light industry rise and heavy industry fall? The answer was, well, the Communist Party CCP put out a directive to promote light industry. Yes. So what did you do? Quote unquote from the guy who introduced us as the economic boss of Shanghai: "We stripped heavy industry factories and turned them into light industry". Now, you bring this forward to what's happened today, Communist Party says isolate people. What happens on the ground level? People go around rolling up the doors of apartment blocks.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:17:10] And that is that is the danger is not that.

STEVE KEEN [00:17:13] But it's also working. Unfortunately, people stop. People will have died of starvation inside those apartmentS. I have no doubt. But the thing, isolation like a brick. And what has happened is that China's doubling rate has fallen from two days to double to 500 days to double.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:17:32] So two questions come out of this. And these are questions which are commonly being asked now in the media. One is. Is it that bad, really? And are we going too far in terms of how we're enforcing it. So, lots of people die from flu every year, infat more than have died from COVID 19 in most countries. But of course, they're ignoring the fact that this is exponential growth.

[00:18:06] The other one is are we going overboard with this? So, an example in the UK is, London is the epicentre for the UK and far worse than, for example, towns in the north of England where you might actually find there's nobody who has it. If you'd lock down London earlier than you might have been able to have less stringent approaches in the rest of the UK where the infection rate is lower or non-existent. So, you could almost lock those towns down as well and say, well, you can go out and go to work and the economy can perform. So, that's a valid question, isn't it? Have we gone too far by closing down everything, completely stopping the economy?

STEVE KEEN [00:18:51] No. And people who are saying this is just like the flu don't understand the exponential function. And this is this is the problem. And this this is a real analogy I saw mentioned by a epidemiologist a couple of days ago, a British one actually, saying that if you have the flu, on average one person getting the flu will infect 1.3 other people. And that means that over 10 cycles of getting the flu, the total number of people who've been infected after 10 cycles is 14. If you have coronavirus, and we find the statistical average that one person infects three other people, after 10 cycles, you will have fifty-nine thousand people infected.

[00:19:53] We can be infected almost immediately, for it actually show symptoms takes between five days and two weeks. The doubling period is running about six days.

[00:20:04] But it does seem to level off, doesn't it? I mean, I hear you and I'm not disagreeing with you. All I'm being is the devil's advocate here, but it does seem to level off. There's a guy, Charles Einstein. I don't know who he is. I don't if he's related to Einstein, perhaps he is.. But he's got a blog. He he points to the Diamond Princess, three thousand seven hundred eleven people on board, 20 tested positive for the virus, half of those had the symptoms, ten died. And yet here we have a boat where everyone is sharing the same air conditioning system, full of old people - half of them are aged over 60 - and yet out of3,711, only 10 people died. You know, that said that that's a pretty low morbidity rate given that everyone was in such a confined space.

STEVE KEEN [00:20:42] 10 people die. But the mortality right rate is one thing. Looking at some of the cases of people who got this darn thing. You don't want to get it. We might be the two are talking a death rate.between 0.3 per cent to two per cent. We're not reallysure of the range. So, it's something at that level point. 0.3 percent is a low death rate, but it's about I think it's about two or three times the death rate from the flu. There's trouble is not the death rate itself, it's how fast the death rate grows and how fast you overwhelm all your facilities. And this is the problem. We don't have enough intensive care units for the number of people who are being infected with this at the peak level of infection. So, the medical system will break down. The people who get it, yes, maybe 0.3 percent will die. Apparently, it could be as high as 15 percent gets severe symptoms, severe enough to be hospitalized. We can't hospitalise 15 percent of the population. This is the overwhelming impact of a very rapid growth of the rate of growth disease, even if it has a low level of mortality. And still got a higher level of mortality than monthly. Even if you’re talking 0.3, it's still a lot higher than the flu, I believe.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:22:03] And Ithe US office is going to be hit very hard by this. The UN says their death rate in the US could reach quarter of a million. In fact, if you look at the number of deaths, if you take it from when 50 people died, an extract from that day, you'll find that the US is actually increasing the death rate alarmingly faster than Italy did even. And the UK. Even though they can spend big and have spent big debt to solve the problem. So what's what's gone wrong there? Other than having an idiot in charge?

STEVE KEEN [00:22:45] The Dunning-Kruger effect writ large. The state of medical health in America in general is appalling. I think this is one thing you can say, this is this is testing the veracity of medical systems all around the planet and America is failing big time. This is the best argument possible for needing universal health care in America. The whole idea that it should be not only private but linked to you being employed, as you said earlier, so you lose your job, you lose access to health insurance. You can't even afford to be dragged to the front door of the hospital. They'll throw you out because you can't afford to get inside the entrance. It's totally inadequate for normal situations and catastrophically bad for this situation.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:23:27] So there's two ways we could come out of this isn't the one. One is that we manage to keep it under control. And therefore, everybody looks at this and says, you know, look, it wasn't that bad after all. And we just returned to normality. The other way is that we find that it is worse than we thought and we have more and more government controls as a result of it. And that challenges more civil liberties. And we find that we can't get them back. So, we all become like China at the end of this. Either of those scenarios is not a good scenario.

STEVE KEEN [00:23:59] No, that's right. I mean, the most dangerous one probably is the cry wolf syndrome where, you know, somebody cries wolf and it doesn't really happen. So, you think it is never going to matter. And then the real wolf turns up and if you don't do anything and you get destroyed. And this is the argument put forward by a woman called Laurie Garrett. She was The New York Times medical correspondent. And she spent about a decade researching plagues and evolution of new pathogens and so on. And she argued, based on very sound, very, scholarly research, that there are two main dimensions on which pathogens evolve. One is, of course, transmissibility. The other is how virulent the pathogen is. And normally, in an evolutionary sense, when one particular attribute of an organism evolves in one direction strongly, so it becomes much more virulent, for example, it's likely become less transmissible. It sacrifices some genetic capability to go in the opposite direction. Equally, it becomes more transmissible, then becomes less virulent. But the odds were always there that one pathogen would evolve in both directions at the one time - it would get more virulent and more transmissible. Now this certainly isn't as as virulent as SARs, for example, let alone Ebola. But it is more transmissible, by a large margin than either of those diseases - not as transmissible as the measles, thank God, which is the average infection rate that the measles is one person will effect twenty others. This looks like being about three, but it's also got a higher death rate than the normal flu. I think the normal flu has got a death rate of about 0.1 percent. So, one day one in a thousand will die. This looks, we might be lucky at 0.3 but it could be highs as two percent. We really still don't know. But it has got both those characteristics. And the most dangerous is the transmissibility. And the fact, of course, you can transmit it without having without without actually having the symptoms. I think that is the danger.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:26:16] But do you think we do think we will get it in check, though, and over. Over what timeframe?

STEVE KEEN [00:26:20] Well, again, I'm done talking outside of my area.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:26:24] But as a layman, you know, we are all entitled to an opinion. What's your call.

STEVE KEEN [00:26:29] I think we will get it under control and probably in the next six months. That's a guess.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:26:34] I mean, that six months - which brings me onto my second point - we will have had so many civil liberties taken away. Are we going to have to fight to get them back again? The reason I ask that question is (at least the media's covering this), there's a bit of what people are calling heavy handedness by police. They're not actually tackling people to the ground, but stopping people and asking where they going, when they're driving to take a form of exercise in a in a less congested part of the country. You would have thought it was not doing any harm. But they're following by the the letter of the law. I guess they've got nothing else to do because there's not many break ins at the moment, because everyone's at home.

STEVE KEEN [00:27:12] Nobody dares break in because they break into the home of somebody who's got the disease.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:27:14] Exactly. So you can see, it's not police state, but you can see how we're heading in that direction.

STEVE KEEN [00:27:22] Well, I think we I think we do have we have an excessive concept of our own liberty on this planet. And that is something which I think does need to be addressed, because the the idea that we can, you know, go back and be libertarian in our behaviour would be great, if we were the only species on the planet, and didn't need the other species to survive, and didn't need to worry about some of those species actually being parasites on us. Now we do. And we have pushed the sustainability of this biosphere well past its sustainable level. And we are going to pay the price for it. Humans should never have taken over more than a particular fraction of the planet. They should have left a large part of it for the rest of the species that are alive on this planet. And we haven't done it. In one of my posts I quoted work by some epidemiologists and and mathematicians is working out that humans constitute roughly 10 times as much or the mass of the mammals species on the planet as other mammals and our livestock was about 20 times our mass. So, we we far outweigh, if you add up all the elephants, all the lions, all the tigers, all the wallabies - we are 10 times their mass and then our cows at 20 times our mass. That's ludicrous. We've taken up far too much of the planet. It can't just be libertarian ...

PHIL DOBBIE [00:29:05] We talked about this on the podcast last week.If this is worse than we thought, maybe maybe this is part of nature's correction. Let's hope it's not quite so drastic. Just on the final point, we're seeing big spending, obviously, to try and tackle all of this. People who do don't believe in modern monetary theory. You don't think that governments, through the central banks, can create money, are saying this is going to take a long time to pay back and we're going to be paying for this longer than we did for the for the global financial crisis. Yet Donald Trump is spending like it's going out of fashion. He has no intention of paying any of this money back. I mean, he paid for his tax cuts, then he's had his first tranche of his rescue package for the virus. Now he wants a two trillion dollar infrastructure project. He has no intention of paying that back. It's not going to hurt the US economy, is it? But other countries you mentioned Germany and Europe, it sounds like they are.

STEVE KEEN [00:30:04] They don't need to. This is the other crazy thing about it - this whole worry about it, how and how do we pay for it? You print the bloody money.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:30:11] Yeah. You know, you and I know that. And regular, listeners to this podcast know that. So the I guess the question is how, will everybody else start to realise that now? Will people be looking and saying, how come Donald Trump's not paying any of this money back? How come his debt just keeps on increasing? How come Japan has over 200 percent of agovernment debt to GDP ratio and they're still functioning?

STEVE KEEN [00:30:35]  I don't know that is actually going to give the same insights to everybody else, but it should be enough to be a bit of a wakeup call. I mean, people's capacity not to learn from thing slike this is something I'm getting used to realising how little people learn from experience, unfortunately. But, yes, it's going to be a thing that advocates of modern monetary theory can point to and say, look, you got that totally wrong. There is no need to repay it. We could produce the money and as rapidly we wanted to. Etc., etc. All these things are going to become more obvious than they were beforehand. But people's capacity to hang onto an ideology, despite it being proven wrong, is still something that I I don't underestimate. Unfortunately.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:31:25] I can hear the disappointment in your voice.

STEVE KEEN [00:31:28]  It's real. It's real.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:31:31] But you know, if you want a big example, this is a huge example. It's hard to argue against the facts. All right. We'll leave it there. Next time, let's look at how the EU has stuffed all this up and whether it actually could be the end of the EU, certainly the end of the Euro. I think it could be. I'm sure you do, too. But we'll talk about the next week. Good to talk Steve.

PHIL DOBBIE [00:31:53] Actually, we might squeeze in another one before we do that one on the EU because we've got one that's been sitting on the shelf for a while, which we still haven't played, which is one recorded while ago looking at the work of Adam Smith, the early work of Adam Smith. Is there anything in there, anything at all, which we could take out and say applies to a modern-day economy? We'll, look at that next time on the Debunking Economics podcast with Professor Steve Keen. I'm Phil Dobbie. Thanks for listening.