Art carden, who is a professor at samford, sam. 0rd university in birmingham, alabama. Professor carden, what do you teach down there . I teach economics at stanford university. So introductory macroeconomics, intermediate macroeconomics, history and philosophy of politics and econ do you have a philosophy . Economics. You have a philosophy about economics . So im a believer that theres only one kind of economics. Theres good economics. My hope is that i practice good economics. It is what the social universe made out of. So if the physical is made out of mass, then the social is made out of economics. Its people responding to incentives in response to their constraints all the way down. It is essential, i think, to understanding the world works is something that you write. Your newest book, strangers with candy observations from the ordinary business of life nostalgia. The good old days puzzles me because they were horrible. Yeah, the good old days were terrible life for our ancestors. Borrow from Thomas Hobbes used to be solitary poor, nasty, brutish and now it is exactly opposite of all of these things. Used to be solitary in that maybe you met the people in your or your family and that was it. Today were connected with people around the world. It used to be poor per capita in modern dollars was roughly to 5 a day for almost all of history. Now its 10 to 100 times that life used to be nasty. And now life is is much, much, much cleaner if youve ever bathed. In fact, you youve done something regularly that a lot our ancestors never really got a chance to do. Life used to be poor, solitary, poor, nasty. My apologies. Its all nasty, brutish life. Life used to brutish in that the likelihood youre going have your head caved in by someone with a rock the other tribe over was very high and life used to be short. Life expectancy in england and france, the beginning of the 19th century was about. Now its 80. In most countries, the in the rich world. So one of the ways i think about this is that its extremely unlikely that im gonna have to bury one of my children and watching wife die in childbirth is now, by orders of magnitude much less frequent today than it used to be. So the good old days are nice to think about it. Nice to visit by reading about them. But nobody in the world, i think, would actually want to live there. Well, professor cardin, in your view, how did we get from brutish to bullish. We got we there not because of science not which is great by the way or not because of schooling or because of slavery or anything like that. These are all things science and schooling are really nice to have is unambiguously bad, but got here because we adopted what Deirdre Mccloskey and i have called the boudoir deal in another book. Basically we let people alone to innovate, to try new things to start businesses and boom made us rich. And over the last two and a half centuries or so weve seen a huge increase in the number of people who live in the world and a huge decrease in the fraction the population living in extreme poverty. Indeed, over my lifetime, the raw number of People Living in poverty is in fact falling and falling pretty dramatically. And thats truly remarkable. Thats sometimes we referred to that as the greatest ory never told that the the number of People Living in extreme poverty is lower than its ever been. Name one of those innovators. One of those innovators, sam walton. So sam walton, who is responsible for walmart, its appropriate, perhaps, that were in memphis because there are a lot of these innovators that were did important work in memphis. Sam walton took a lot of ideas that other people had, and he made them work in context that a lot of other people thought was crazy. So when he was recruiting in the 1960s or 1950s, in 1960s, he would he would somebody who worked as an executive at a Discount Chain or Something Like that and say, hey, do you wanna come work for me . And then they would go to their boss at whatever discount they worked for and said, hey, im going to go work with this. Walton and they say, fine, ruin your life. Hes crazy. He thinks that discount retailer is going to work in the middle of nowhere, etc. , and then, lo and behold, now here we are, is regularly at the top of the fortune 500 and they have, to coin a phrase, a lot of people to save and live better. Whats the harm that walmart has caused, in your view, on that . There isnt any. I i everybody can tell a horror story about an experience youve had at walmart or about being mistreated by somebody at walmart. But walmart employs over 2 million people. So if. 0. 00, 1 of them are absolute scoundrels, that means youve got a story every couple of days, some horrible thing thats happened at walmart. So i think that on net, walmart has been a serious, positive for the world in some research that my coauthor Charles Courtemanche and i did, we estimated that walmart, the diffusion of walmart supercenters since the late 1980s, actually explains a good fraction of the increase in obesity over roughly two decades. But the the additional the additional improvement in standard peoples standards of living from lower prices exceeds the additional costs for modest obesity related Health Concerns by by a factor of 20. So yeah, so walmart, i think, has been has been a more or less unalloyed good the world now go back what was that term you used that you and Deirdre Mccloskey of the University Illinois at chicago called the nouveau we call it the bourgeois. Bourgeois, yes. Yeah. So this is actually professor mccloskey is term. Yeah, basically the idea is let people innovate allow other people to enter and compete with them, which is thats where it becomes a little bit unstable. And then at the end the day, everybody in the world gets rich. So one of the interesting facts is, again, you take the sam waltons and the jeff bezos of the world, only about 2 or so of the value that they have created. Actually goes to them. So almost about 97 or 98 of the value created by innovation and innovators accrues to the rest of us in the form of consumer surplus. So jeff bezos, elon the waltons are worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. But this is a very, very, very small fraction of the value that theyve created the rest of us. So if we let people without doing things like our ancestors did, which would be like to throw them off of cliffs and stuff, and then we allow people to come in and enter market if they think they can do it better, which is what we let sam walton which what we love. Jeff bezos do. Then at the end of the day, they make a lot of money, but they make us much, much, much better off. So markets work, in your view . Absolute government played a role in any way, shape or form. Do it through licensing or minimum wage or safety and regulation licensing. No minimum wage, no safety regulations . Absolutely not. Because first of all, there are excellent mechanisms by which markets take care of all of all of these issues with respect to licensing, licensing or licensing consist of a series of barriers to entry, it creates higher for the people in the licensed professions. But the gains to them are exceeded by the losses imposed on the rest of society in the form higher prices and lower output. In the case of minimum wages, the evidence, i think, is pretty clear that minimum wages have disappointment effects. There might be some positive distributional consequences, but what we do with what we do, minimum wages and rules like that is we make the least of these among us, unemployable. And i think thats not only is it economically, i think its its as a christian. I think it is its just a morally problematic. And then when we think about safety regulations and things like that, a lot of people have a very positive view of the fda. But one could argue that the fda is a killing machine in that the the associated with getting fda approval for new drugs cost lots and lots and lots and lots of lives. So while its true that we have safer drugs as, a result of the fda. We have far fewer drugs, which makes us a lot less healthy and makes us a lot more likely to die. So i would argue that governments are probably inevitable, but not necessary for economic growth. And the less they, the better. Now, art carden you mentioned that youre a christian. I want to quote your book, strangers with candy. I dont think there is a contra addiction between being a libertarian an economist and a christian why did you feel that necessary to include line . Well, because a lot of people so first of all, they have dim view of libertarianism. They think its we say Something Like, leave me alone and ill make you rich. So they think they think that were just a bunch of kind of antisocial jerks who this atomistic society and dont think that families are necessary or what have you. Thats not true with respect. The fact of being an economist, its a particular way of looking at the world again, that i think is essential if youre going to understand reality with respect to the intersection between, economics, libertarianism, christianity. I think that we we need to take very seriously the idea that people are created in the image of god and that people are created in the image of god. That puts a very, very strong limits on what we can do to them. We can treat them even for quote unquote, good ends. And were not respecting people, peoples creation. The creation, the image of god when we tax them, them, etc. Moreover, of the things that i think is especially interesting because i want to help the world my students want to help the world we see poverty and things like that. And it breaks our hearts. But one of the things that economics helps us to see how in an extended social order like a free market almost all of the good we do for world is without actually to do so. So adam wrote about how it is not from the benevolence, its not by appealing to the benevolence of the butcher, the baker, or the brewer that we get them to provide our dinner. But we appeal to their own interests. And this is not an apologetic sort of untrammeled selfishness, the way that, again, we try to teach our children, our kids to behave. Rather, its a recognition of the fact that the butcher the baker and the brewer do not exist. For us, they have own families. They have their own issues. They have their own problems. And it is the height of presumption then for me to walk into the butcher shop and sort of stamp my feet and say, im hungry, i expect you to me. Well, again, the has got his own family. Hes got his own children. Hes got his own problems to solve. And if i want him to take care of me and to take care of my family and to advance the kinds of causes that i think are important, i have to do something for him. And when we do that, we do that. Weve created a world that is very wealthy once again, where instead of being solitary poor, nasty, brutish and short, its the of all of this you have a section in your book called that which is seen that which is not right. Yes. Is a takeoff on frederick bastiats invisible hand. Invisible hand. Crikey. Broken window fallacy, i think is step ahead of myself. I mentioned my kids. And one of the things that one of the things that being a parent and an economist has done is is creating multiple examples of stuff getting broken and like actual physical that actual examples of the broken window fallacy its easy sometimes focus on the very very on the very very easy to see benefits of a policy while ignoring the harder to see costs. So lets take tariffs for example or regulations on, say, avocado imports. So one of the exercises i give to my students is i show them a picture of an avocado in california, and i okay, this guy, you know, hes hes better off because we have regulations that prevent importation. Avocados from mexico are we, as a society, better off . And its really easy to see the benefits this guy and his family. Its a lot harder to see what we could have had had we paid less for avocados and had we, in fact, actually had more, which would be the case if we were to get rid of avocado import restrictions, the broken window has, a very, very specific meaning for me because we have, in fact, actually broken lots of windows in our house. One morning we were getting ready to go to church and boys were out in the front yard and they were throwing rocks because thats what they do. And i heard this popping sound and i walked outside and the passenger side window of my car was shattered and i thought about what sort of conversation will we will we have if my older son had said, you know, dad will actually, this is going to create income for the glassmaker and hes going to then spend that money on new suit. And thats going to create income for all these other people and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you tried, i probably would have been matter because not only would he have fact broken our window, he would have then invoked a logical or a serious economic fallacy to it. Look like he was actually making the world a better place when in fact it wasnt. So why . Why our broken window help other because you are supporting manufacturing, etc. Etc. Etc. Well, i forget exactly how much it cost. Fix the window. Lets assume lets assume it was 200 bucks because we could have taken 200 and we could have kept it in the bank. We could have helped to finance someones new business or someones new home purchase. We would have had the car window and the new business or and the new home purchase. Instead, all we have is a car window. So we could have used those resources to produce new stuff instead of replacing stuff that broke. And that would have made us better off. That wouldve made us even better off then. Then we would have been in the world with the broken window. Whats the meaning of your title . Strangers candy. So this actually came from at a Kids Birthday Party and. I was thinking about how you might kind of two things. One, when youre growing up, your parents say, dont get in a car with strangers and everyone says, dont take candy from strangers. And im at this Birthday Party and looking at all this candy and thinking we dont know any of the people who made this. We dont know any of the people who sold it to us. This is literally, literally candy from strangers. And yet were eating it because we trust the brand name. We get it, we get a lift or an uber because we have a very, very solid Rating System helping us to understand that we can in fact get in a car with a stranger and not worry about being murdered, being being sort of taken somewhere and and poorly when when you look at a snickers bar, again, you know, no one probably who anything to do with getting that snickers bar to you and yet by virtue of by virtue of power of the brand name, youre able and willing, and then in the case of a lot of kids, enthusiastic about taking candy from strangers because they know that if they if they dont provide a high quality product, youre not going to buy again, you might they might you might even sue them. And they have a very, very strong incentive in, a free market economy, to take care of people they dont actually know and to care for people they may not actually care specifically about. And i find that remarkable. So somebody somebody works in marketing for. Imminent now. Yeah i mean and mars i think they make snickers bars someone who works the Marketing Department wakes up every morning and they drink their coffee and theyre not thinking know theres an economist in birmingham, alabama whos got kids and you know, they want to have candy at a Birthday Party. Im going to go for that. Im going to go and do it for them know theyve got their own family, got their own kids, theyve got their own mortgage to pay, own everything. Theyre willing to take care of us because willing to take care of them. And i find that remarkable and i find it, frankly, kind of beautiful. And you call that in your book, in the impersonal, unknowing burden bearing. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So so the bible exhorts to bear one anothers burdens. And this one of the ways that were able to bear other peoples burdens without actually knowing those people, without even even in a very articulated sense, bearing the burdens. So if youve ever bought insurance, for example, what is that that people together to bear one anothers burdens . Art carden professor at sanford. Sanford is associated with so is a it is a Baptist University or typically traditionally been a Baptist University. Long story. We are no longer formally affiliated with the alabama baptist convention, but it is a very serious. Christian university. That is a very serious spiritual place and a very serious intellectual place. And this is his book, strangers with candy. And as he writes in it, quote again, i dont think there is a contradiction between a libertarian and economist and a christian. Thanks for being book tv