🇬🇧 The Religion of the Free Market

This is a conversation with Naomi Oreskes, Professor of History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University.

Originally trained as a geologist, she became a historian of science, and has particularly focused on how certain ideas become established in public debate despite their lack of scientific foundation. She became widely known to the public with her book "Merchants of Doubt," published in 2010.

In her latest work "The Big Myth," co-written with Erik Conway, she dissects the origins and construction of what she calls "market fundamentalism" - this quasi-religious belief in the market's ability to solve all societal problems.

How has this ideology become so entrenched that it has become a major obstacle in addressing environmental challenges? Why does it continue to exert such influence despite growing evidence of its limitations, especially in the face of the climate crisis?

We discuss these questions and many others in this insightful conversation that invites us to reflect on how certain ideas, even when refuted by facts, can continue to shape our societies and our responses to major contemporary challenges.

The big Myth

(00:00) hello Professor Oreskes

hello Julien good to see you well well thanks a lot for um for joining the me and the podcast you know I'm thrilled to really have the chance to to spend an hour with you to discuss your perspective on some of the major you know challenges of our time to and to guide our conversation I will we draw on on the analysis and insights from your latest book you know the big myth um I have a usual question that I ask first which is could you briefly introduce yourself and share a bit about your preferred way of looking at the world you know what are the lenses

(00:38) through which you view and analyze Society in general my name is Naomi Oreskes I'm a professor of the history of science at Harvard University and also an Affiliated professor of Earth and planetary Sciences I began my professional career as a scientist I trained as a geologist I worked as a mining and exploration geologist when I was in my 20s uh and then I evolved over time to be more of a historian and philosopher of science largely because I became very interested in the question of what is science how does it work how do scientists judge and evaluate

(01:13) evidence and most important if a scientist says we know that X is true uh we know the climate is changing we know that this particular virus causes this particular disease what is that really based on what does it really mean when scientists say we know that this is true it's such an important question and it's astonishingly understudied when you think about how important it is and particularly when I was starting out it was almost entirely unstudied in the context of earth science most history and philosophy of science at that time

(01:45) was history of physics or history of biology so I became interested in earth science it's this very important science that was quite understudied and that was clearly becoming more important in our lives as people became more aware of issues like the ozone hole and climate change which were very much in the four when I was in school in the late 1970s and early 1980s in terms of my world viw today to now I think it's a blend of being a scientist and historian as a person with my roots in Natural Science I'm extremely interested in evidence I'm

(02:19) interested in the question of how we look at the world and how it is that we see certain kinds of facts as providing evidence but also why people resist and reject evence uh but also as a historian I think that one can never understand one can never have the answers to those questions just by looking at the current moment the way we think about the world the way we judge claims the way we judge evidence is deeply historically anchored and has so much to do with the path we've traveled to get to where we are today and that's

(02:52) why the answers to these questions are not the same in France as they is are in the United States or Japan or Nigeria because we all come to these questions with different experiences different background ideologies different priors as a mathematicians would call it and that means we judge and evaluate information in different ways based on those different histories and so I think scientists natural scientists often make a mistake when they think that they can discuss a complex and important issue like climate change or like the covid

(03:24) pandemic and not take into account the historical and cultural setting well I mean that's very relevant to where I am right now and where I think the listeners are because um if they listen to the podcast they just ended a seven episode series on epistemology and the history of uh of how we build knowledge and actually you were mentioned in that series you know when it comes to your latest works on uh you know can can you know how we build uh our ideas and how we can be very very much manipulated and uh and I want to to dive into your your latest work uh your book delves

(04:07) into the origins of what you call the myth of the free market and I want to know first you know how did you come up with the idea of studying this uh specifically you know this specific constructed narrative in all my work one question has led to the next question so I certainly would not have guessed 30 years ago that I would write a book about the history of of free market ideology but it really evolved from our work on climate change denial so when Eric Conway and I were writing merchants of Doubt which is now going back nearly 20 years since we started that project

(04:43) the question we had in mind at that time was why would intelligent people reject climate science because it was pretty clear to US based on what was going on in America at that time that many of the people who were rejecting climate science were not stupid they were not uneducated they included the president and the vice president of the United States say what you will about their politics no one could ever say that Dick Cheney was an unintelligent man and they also included some key scientists who became the focus of our work the people we called the merchants of Doubt these

(05:15) four key very powerful very influential American scientists who were super intelligent people quite brilliant in fact um you know on the level of Nobel laurates so it wasn't remotely possible that they didn't understand the science so then the question was what was motivating them and most people assumed the answer to that question was money but as we began to do our research we really found a different story we found very little evidence that they were primarily driven by money uh but what we found was very strong evidence that they

(05:46) were motivated by a powerful political ideology which was really the ideology of Market fundamentalism although they didn't use that term but it was essentially a framework that argued that government shouldn't intervene in markets because if they do if they compromise our economic freedom then this will lead to compromises to political and personal freedom as well and so a large part of that book was was figuring that out and so the end of the book we talk about Market fundamentalism we talk about what

(06:19) the intellectual framework is and how it informs climate change denial but we didn't really have time in that book to figure out why they thought that in the first place where did these ideas come from especially because you don't have to know a lot about history to realize the ways in which Market fundamentalist thinking is fundamentally flawed and really refuted by the experiences of History so we set that aside as a different separate question took us a few years to come back to it but that is what motivated writing this new book so

(06:49) the new book is really an attempt to answer this question where does Market fundamentalism come from and why do so many people accept it even though there's so much evidence telling us that it's it's just not a correct picture of how the world works well I mean we can start there you know by defining what you mean by market fun fundamentalism you know use that term to describe the near religious belief in the Market's ability to solve all problems and uh so why why is that and why do you think that term par is appropriate well we think it's

(07:27) appropriate for a couple of reasons one of which you just suggested it is a kind of Quasi religious faith it is fundamentalist and we borrowed this term from George Soros who I think borrowed it from someone else uh he didn't he didn't invent it but he is one who you know first really used this term widely to describe this kind of Quasi religious Faith Like sort of fundamentalist faith in the power and efficacy of markets so we wanted to convey that aspect of it it's also it's very closely related to

(07:58) neoliberalism one can think of it as a form of neoliberalism and we thought about simply referring to it as neoliberalism but we chose not to do that because we felt the term neoliberalism is thrown around so much that it's one of those terms that it's hard to really know exactly what people mean by it uh John Williams The Economist who developed the Washington consensus uh says it's used as a swear word you know so we felt like calling neoliberalism wouldn't really be quite wouldn't really quite capture what we were trying to convey but Market

(08:28) fundamentalism and again putting the emphasis on markets because neoliberalism puts the emphasis on liberalism but that's really confusing for an American audience because what we mean by liberalism today is quite different from what classical liberals meant by that term so because the book is primarily um describing things happening in the United States and although we are super thrilled that the book is now available in France and we have several other foreign translations being produced we really think this is a story that's really important for people

(09:00) around the globe to understand but it is in certain ways a very American story and so in that sense we thought it was important to use a term that would be legible to our American audiences and I mean to understand how does this quasi religious Faith manifest in modern policy discussions you know to be concrete and and why why do you make the parallel with religion why is it so related to Faith well we see it manifested in this very moment with the Ro of Elon Musk and Viv uh ramas Swami in the you know upcoming Trump Administration that already you know practically before the ink was even dry

(09:39) on the ballots back in November we saw them immediately starting to bring back this idea of uh stimulating the economy through deregulation and arguing that markets are overregulation that the government is too big that the government needs to slashed so the so-called Department of government efficiency and I say called because of course it's not a department it's two people who aren't even elected and of course it's super ironic that these unelected people are going on and on about the overweening power of unelected

(10:09) administrative agencies in the government but the whole move to try to slash government reduce government workers is 100% aligned with Market fundamentalist thinking because Market fundamentalists see government as a threat they see government as a bad thing because they see it as a threat to individual liberty and particularly a threat to Liberty of business people and the argument that they make and this is part of what is superficially appealing is to say that government is sort of a dead weight on the economy so if you reduce government if you let the private

(10:41) sector have free reign if you let the market do its magic that was the term that Ronald Reagan popularized then the economy will Thrive and people will do well so if that were true then of course you could see why people would want to reduce the size and the scale of the federal government or central government in France or Germany or wherever it is but the problem is it's not true it's not supported by the evidence of Economics or the evidence of history and so then when people believe something that's not supported by the evidence then it's a kind of faith and you know don't get me wrong I'm not I don't mean

(11:18) to bash religion I have great respect for um people of authentic Faith but um it gets taken on I mean I guess the the important distinction here is people of Faith know their that belief in God is a leap of faith and and they're clear about that and they don't pretend that religion is science they know that religion is religion the problem with Market fundamentalism is that the economic part of it presents itself as a science it presents itself as derived from economics but in fact it really isn't uh and it's certainly not derived

(11:51) from history so it presents itself as a kind of fact-based scientific framework but in many many ways it operates as a kind of Quasi religious ideology so i' rather just refer to it as an ideology because I think that's the correct word to describe it it is ideological and so these people are driven by certain kinds of ideological commitments that don't really stand um you know the test of empirical evidence so in this book Eric and I Eric hom and I are really bringing to Bear both our historical credentials and our scientific credentials to say look this is not a science this is not

(12:25) evidence-based it's people are not revising their views in light of new information instead they're sticking to these claims that in many ways have been shown to be false and that's what gives it this sort of Faith likee component and and we'll get into this I think it's interesting to understand you know where this comes from where these ideas come from because they don't they don't come from nowhere and it started in the 70s we'll get back to that but first I would like to understand a little bit a little bit better the frame you know what are the the core ideas of this ideology you

(12:55) know like the fact that uh government is bad because it threaded you know Freedom or that the vision of the market as some some kind of autonomous ident entity and doed with its own W wisdom you know what are the the pillar of that uh of that thinking of that ideology there are two key components that you just alluded to the first has to do with the Primacy of markets the idea that markets are the most powerful the most effective the most important mechanism that exists for organizing not just the economy but Society in general

(13:32) and so Market fundamentalists emphasize the Primacy of markets they want as many things as possible to be left to the private sector so you'll see them arguing like in the next few weeks we will see already the signs are there they'll argue for the privatization of Social Security they'll all argue for the privatization of Medical Services uh they may even argue for the privatization of Public School Systems so privatization is a central role because of this um valorization of markets and they construct the market as

(14:04) if it were independent as and this is again the sort of pseudoscientific aspect of this um they talk about the market as if it exists in the same way that um I don't know the giant SE tree exists or dinosaurs or the planetary climate system so they talk about the market as a thing often in capital letters the market very Germanic um and they talk about it also in a kind of anthropomorphized way that the market is efficient that the market is magical that the market has wisdom that we can trust the invisible hands so it's also like anthropomorphized that the market

(14:42) has a bodily component so it's almost like a kind of deification that the market is conceptualized there's a great book called The Market is God by one of my um Harvard colleagues Harvey Cox so it's almost as if the market is a kind of God a sort of deification of the market but going along with that the flip side of that is the demonization of government and these two pieces go hand in hand they really have to be understood as two sides of the same coin because because of their faith and confidence in markets Market fundamentalists are generally hostile to government particularly centralized

(15:19) forms of government like the US federal government or the central government in France they see governments as threatening personal Liberty they see Mark it says maximizing personal choice and so these things two things go together so they want to maximize the privatization of things in our lives and they want to minimize the role of government and of course this is deeply problematic on many many different levels and in so the book we spend the line share of the book really explaining where these ideas came from

(15:50) and how they were developed marketed propagandized um given credibility through academic research but also how at the same time they develop a political strategy to limit the power of government and particularly where government wants to step in to protect the rights of vulnerable people or workingclass people uh to undermine the power of unions and also to limit the power of government to protect the natural environment well let's get let's jump into this now to understand you know where it comes from and then I I keep some of the questions uh to the end I'm

(16:29) anticipating some of the cont contradictory you know um arguments and I want to have your answers on that of course it's interesting to to see what you have to say but you know I want to go into the architects of the myth you know who were who are these these people who are who are the main architects of this uh ideological construction as you describe it well I'd say that the whole project Works in part because it builds on a couple of kernels of truth right I think every good lie or every good myth has kernels

(17:02) of truth and that's what makes it potentially credible so there are kernels of Truth in this argument uh and this is where it relates to neoliberalism kernels of Truth rooted in Classical liberalism so those kernels of Truth have to do with the potential for centralized government to be tyrannical and if you think about the American Revolution the French Revolution right both of those are rebellions against monarchs uh monarchs who Reign not by the consent of the government but by hereditary privilege and both the French Revolution the American Revolution are rebelling against that and so Classical

(17:36) liberalism classical Indi Enlightenment ideals emphasize the rights of the individual um in America you know life liberty in the pursuit of happiness in France fraternity eality um I forgot the third one fraternity Liberty frat exactly so so similar Concepts in both countries and so the idea is that protecting the rights of the individual is crucial to a democratic politic so that's not wrong uh I think most of us would agree with that and we can understand its roots in the reaction against monarchy so neoliberals take

(18:13) that but they develop it a 100 more than 100 years later 150 years later in a very different context where we're no longer dealing with a a hereditary monarchy we're actually dealing with democracies that are elected and should at least in ideal cases represent the will of the people but they turn it on its head in order to limit the power of government based on a renewed argument about the rights of individuals but also about the power of the marketplace and here they draw on what we argue as a misrepresentation of Adam Smith so a misrepresentation of classical economics but also in

(18:53) cruci Austrian economics so the core of 20th century neoliberalism comes out of a group of people in Austria led by a number of different people but the two we focus on in our book are ludic Fon mes and friederick Fon Hayak because these are the two that the Americans relied on the most so both Fus and Fon Hayak begin to develop this argument that we've already discussed about markets helping to protect individual rights so the argument in instead of so they in a way they're flipping CL Classical liberalism on its

(19:28) head instead of depending on Democratic elected governments to protect our rights they now now say actually government is a threat to our rights and I'll tell you in a minute why the thing that really protects our rights is the marketplace because in the marketplace we make decisions and Powers distributed to all the different people who are buying and selling things in the marketplace so the more you rely on markets the more you distribute power and you prevent its concentration in centralized government and the centralized government that they

(19:59) particularly have in mind is the Soviet Union and Fus in particular develops this argument against socialism he says socialism can never be Democratic because the moment you concentrate economic power in a centrally planned economy run by you know a polit bureau or whoever it is necessarily in order to enforce the plan they have to tell people what to do they have to tell you where you can work which Factory will build how many tractors means also saying how many people will work in that factory they'll have to tell you where

(20:33) you can live what job you can have and so socialism will necessarily lead to totalitarianism and this is the argument that's picked up on Friedrich Von haak in his the book book road to Surf them now this is where it's the details really matter and this is why would this is what I would say the skeptical uh counterarguments funus was not entirely wrong about that he certainly had an important point about theis risks of centrally planned economies as operating in the Soviet Union but what he and vanon haak do then is to say but it's

(21:06) not just a centralized economy it's any concentration of power in a central government even in a democratically elected government and that move to me is very powerful and very noxious because now they begin to try to undermine the legitimacy of democratically elected governments which are very very different than the totalitarian governments of the Soviet Union and it's that thread that gets picked up in the United States and in the book we tell you know exactly how that's done but a key part of it is that these a group of American businessmen

(21:40) sort of captains of industry Factory owners people associated with Fortune 500 companies like Dupont and General Motors very very famous companies famous people like Alfred Sloan actually bring funes and vanak to America they import these foreign theorists they get them jobs in American universities and then they begin to promote their work both in popular context and in academic life in order to give credibility to these ideas in the American context well it's good that uh we go a little bit in the past we go back to the

(22:18) past because I mean and I want to to go to the beginning you know where and when did it really start to to pick up I I understand at first it was an ideology that um that was based on um critics of Communism you know in states that are centralized and also I guess there was also that uh willingness for economic efficiency you know and try to to maximize you know profits Etc and you mentioned that the rise of Market fundamentalism began with Carter and then accelerated with rean in the in the early s in the US and toucher in the UK

(23:02) and also continued with accelerated actually under Clinton could you walk us through the key Milestone that really solidified that ideology first in the US and then through the globalization to you know across the globe well I think there's a few things one of the things we show in the book is the how the market fundamentalists develop this framework develop this ideology and then they're ready they're sort of standing ready for the moment or the opportunity where they can then push these ideas which up until the 1970s

(23:34) have been rejected by most the American people and are not considered credible even by most conservatives and even by most Republican leaders so for example president Dwight Eisenhower um who I would say was sort of well I don't know what the right way to describe it is but the last Republican president who um well Nixon's not really a market fundament but I'll just okay I'll just spit it out the last good Republican president I mean I think Dwight Eisenhower was in many ways a great president and he accepted fully accepted that government had to play a key role

(24:07) um in addressing the failures of capitalism so for example Social Security to protect people against extreme poverty and there's a famous uh letter that we quote in the books where he says to his brother anyone who want any party that wanted to eliminate Social Security you'd never hear from that party again and then he says well there are few there are a few people who want to do that but their numers minuscule and they're stupid so you know there's really this very strong consensus after the Great Depression in

(24:35) World War II that the American government needs to play a bigger role in protecting people from market failures the abuses of capitalism abuses of Labor this sort of thing but it begins to change in the 1970s and one of the really interesting things about Milton Friedman who's one of the key economists who promotes these ideas in the United States after World War II is he actually says the role of the intellectual is to have the ideas ready so that when the moment comes they can be implemented and that begins in the

(25:04) 1970s with Jimmy Carter because of a set of events that you know economists would call exogenous events events that happen in the world that are not internally caused by anything in the United States or anything in the United Kingdom but it has to do with the rise of stagflation so typically economists think of inflation or unemployment um or inflation in a stagnant economy as being one one or the other so if the economy is boisterous good growing that's a good thing you have low unemployment but it tends to be

(25:35) inflationary on the contrary if you have a weak economy low growth that's bad for employment but it tends to keep inflation in check so it's it's often been viewed as a tradeoff and one of the functions of federal of centralized Banks like the FED in the United States or the Central Bank in England has been to manage interest rates to to sort of manage that balance between uh economic growth and inflation and in the post-war period this seemed to be working pretty well until the 1970s and then something

(26:08) happened and we saw both in the United States and in Europe stagflation stagnant economy with low growth yet high in some cases very very high rates of inflation in some parts of the world double digit inflation and this was both really bad for people and also confusing and so into that breach the the market fundamentalist said we have the answer we know what is driving this and they said there's two things that are driving it excessive public spending particularly in Europe and um an overly regulated economy and this is the argument that Margaret

(26:48) Thatcher particularly picks up in the United Kingdom in the 1970s but also then Jimmy C as well people begin to accept that argument and again it has some kernel of Truth so in the United States and we talk about this in the book um there were a lot of regulations put in place during the Great Depression some of which just didn't make any sense anymore because the world had changed so regulations to do with telecommunications uh regulations to do with Trucking and so there was a plausible credible argument that some of

(27:16) those regulations needed to be Revisited or maybe even eliminated but the neoliberals take it way too far in our opinion uh in the United Kingdom the the issue there is is trickier but similar and it has a lot to do with unions so unions in the United Kingdom had become very very powerful and there had been some general strikes that had really upset a lot of British people brought the country to a standstill and Margaret Thatcher comes and says this is outrageous this is ridiculous these unions have way too much power and I

(27:48) think that probably most British people agreed that there was some truth in that so this combination of the argument that unions became too powerful markets are too regulated we need to back off the and there's too much public spending the government needs to back off and leave more things to the marketplace and so again not necessarily an entirely incorrect argument but in my opinion and I think the opinion of many people Thatcher and then Ragan begin to take it way too far and they begin to try to undo many of the protections the

(28:20) legitimate protections that had been put in place for labor for workers and particularly the area that brought me and Eric hway to this work the environment and so in the Reagan Administration particularly we begin to see the attempt to unravel the Environmental Protections that had been put in place mostly in the 60s and 70s that had really done a huge amount of benefit uh to clean up the air and the water of the of the United States and to begin this program of trying to dismantle those protections under the name of deregulation and that's the

(28:53) other key move that Reagan makes that's very important to understand the word deregulate is initially used to refer to regulated markets like Aviation you know regulated Aviation or regulated Trucking but he uses it then also to refer to undoing Environmental Protection or undoing protections for child labor or for workers and so he expands the realm of quote deregulation to be not just about specific markets that might benefit from more competition but also about undoing the role of government in protecting the

(29:27) environment workers and the vulnerable I want also to understand the the balance there was between basically trying to be efficient economically and some might argue that also framing this as a myth thism is the genuine success of free market principles in fostering Innovation and economic growth and um and and basically the the ideology um that is not directly related to uh economic efficiency but more to uh basically freeing up um the the the the market freeing up the country and letting people get rich and if uh you know there there are two parts in this because one one one might might say that

(30:17) you can generally think that by doing this and uh freeing the market you can build a better common goods you see what I mean it's not just about can I jump in because nothing gets my blood boiling more than that argument so first of all it's just false and I mean your compatriot py has shown how it's false I mean massive in income inequality is not good for countries we see many different ways in which it damages democracy uh damages Public Health damages the common good so the idea that somehow we build the common good by letting a small

(30:52) number of people become super super rich it's just I'm not even going to call that a myth I'm going to call that a lie we know that that is false um and it's really it's very upsetting actually to hear people who I think know that that's not true make that claim um so that's but but if we go back to the sort of more subtle part of the argument that I can be calmer about so it's really important to investigate this so as you said many people make the claim that markets are efficient and government is inefficient well go find me the paper or

(31:23) papers where that's ever been proven one of the astonishing things about economics and I just didn't set out this book to like be a tiate or a pmic against the field of economics and I often get asked about that and I'm not the purpose of this book is not to say that economics is not a science I think there are many excellent economics who do work that is scientific but there's also this strain in some parts of Economics that takes principles as articles of faith in a very inadequately examined way and this argument about

(31:55) efficient markets is one of them and one of the really astonishing things we found when we're writing this book is when John Williams says well actually it's really interesting you know we always say markets are efficient but you know you actually can't find the place where anybody ever showed that that was true and then he kind of says well it must be true because everyone believes it and like hello wait what you know so the fact is there's there are reasons to believe that markets can be efficient in many contexts but there's also reasons to believe that they can be quite inefficient and we see this in

(32:26) healthcare when you compare the States to Europe where in the United States we have a much more privatized medical system health care costs are wildly higher in the United States than they are in Europe and we do not get better results we get worse results so the healthcare markets in the United States are extremely inefficient and that's just one example the flip side about government so everyone would like to say oh the government is so inefficient well me where was that ever proven actually we have many programs in the United States and in Europe that have worked

(32:57) very well well to do what they were designed to do and Social Security in the United States is the obvious example we used to have massive amounts of poverty among the elderly in the United States we have almost no poverty among the elderly in the United States today and I think one of the reasons that the Republicans consistently attack Social Security is that it disproves their theories it's an efficient government program that works well that does what it's intended to do and people like it and so if they were to acknowledge that was true it would be a major reputation

(33:27) of their Broad generalized Claim about government inefficiency so they can't admit that and so instead they frankly lie about social security and they've been lying about it for a long time well I want to understand you know how these ideas progressed uh because as you said 50 years ago uh everybody in the political class in the US were thinking that this was nuts you know to think that the government didn't have a role to play and now it's the country so how did this progress and uh why did for example Democrats who historically Champion regulation Embrace embraced this Market vision during the Clinton

(34:07) era and what was the roles of the think TKS that you mention in the book yeah so the piece about why Democrats Embrace this really complicated so let me answer the the first part too I think the answer about how these ideas came to the Flor I think there's really three things so one is what we've already said there's a kernel of Truth and some of the arguments and there's no question that in the 1970s there was a significant problem about trying to understand stack flation and also trying to revisit regulations for the 1920s and 30s that really didn't make sense 50 years later but a big part of it also is

(34:44) persistence money and organization and what we show in the book and this is why the book is so long and you don't have to read it all but you know we had to be persistent enough to show their persistence um they're really really persistent The Story begins in the early 20th century with debates over child labor and workplace accidents and death and many many people in the United States during what we call the Progressive Era were talking about the failures of capitalism the social cost of capitalism the huge numbers of children that worked in dangerous

(35:17) conditions the huge numbers of workers who were killed or injured on the job every single year the huge numbers of people who had jobs and yet were living in poverty and so a set of reforms were put in place to address these real recognized failures of free market or mostly unregulated capitalism the business Community took this as a great affront on their prerogatives and also another component of this is social Darwinism we can get into that if we want to but they took it as a really profound personal insult that the government was telling them how

(35:50) to run their businesses and they didn't like that and so they begin to develop this argument but they realized that if they just say well I want the right to exploit children in my factories I want the right to kill workers in my factories and on my railroads and in my Minds most people would say no you don't have the right to do that but if they said well but I have the common good at heart I want to develop Prosperity that will help All American people that's a much more credible argument and so very quickly they realize they will not win

(36:24) this case defending child labor but they will win the case or they could win the case if they cast it as a question of freedom and personal choice and Liberty liberte right super important to all of us and so they begin to develop that argument and they do it over a long period of time and in many different ways so starting seriously in the 1920s with debates about electricity regulation running up to the present day they have cultivated these arguments in many different ways and so in the book we show one of the things they do are

(36:58) propaganda campaigns overt propaganda campaigns that they themselves acknowledge are propaganda advertising marketing uh pamphlets magazines lecture series newsletters aimed at teachers at religious leaders and really bombarding the cultural landscape with these arguments and they know that it won't happen overnight but they have the persistence the money and the organization to do it and so in the book we show how that begins in the 20s and 30s with efforts to influence uence curricula at universities to rewrite

(37:31) textbooks used in schools and then we carry it forward through radio television and into American politics in the Reagan period and supporters of deregulation argue that it has often led to Innovation and increased consumer choice and it's protecting you know Freedom what do you make of this claim you know particular in Industries like technology or you know Aviation well that's another one that makes my blood boil because either they're lying or they're idiots because no one who knows anything about

(38:03) the history of Technology can possibly think that that's true and it's interesting because before we decided to write this book that was actually the book that Eric and I were thinking about writing and we actually had hired a research assistant we had a lot of notes about it and then Marian matato wrote the entrepreneurial state which it's a little different than the book we would have written of course but essentially makes the same argument and the argument is this the idea that technological innovation comes primarily from deregulated markets is false it is

(38:32) simply not true maybe in the 3r century maybe in the 7th Century maybe even in the 18th century but not in the 19th and 20th centuries not in you know our lifetimes and recent history if you look at all of the major technological innovations of the 20th century and especially the ones that the tech Bros love to boast about the internet GPS computation systems computers computer language Aviation railroads radio television all of the things that made the modern world what it is were all developed either by the public sector or by public private Partnerships with a

(39:13) big big role for the visible hand of government and particularly the internet the internet was invented by the American government by scientists paid for contracted organized by the US Department of Defense none of that was done by guys in hoodies and garages in Meno Park what those guys did was to once the government Declassified the internet which was originally called arpanet they gave the opportunity for entrepreneurs to develop consumer products and they did that well and there's no question those people deserve credit for what they did but they did

(39:49) not invent the internet and without the internet this whole universe you and me talking today none of this would have happened without the US government and why did the US government develop the internet well for military Communications and uh I mean you describe I want to go into this so to to to use climate change as an example because you you describe climate change as a textbook for a market failure textbook case you know why does opposition to regulation persist even as you know evidence mons that the market is not efficient to to drive sufficient

(40:30) Innovation or sufficiently you know quickly well exactly I mean that is exactly the point we're not saying that Innovation can't come from the private sector but what we've seen particularly in the case of climate change is there has been Innovation but it hasn't come nearly as quickly or at the scale that we need and where we have seen uh scaling for example in the decrease in the cost of photovoltaics we all of the people have looked at that closely have concluded that government has played a really really major role in stimulating

(41:00) markets to to do that work so um market failure is really crucial to this whole story and because it's really crucial again to the way in which this is an ideology that refuses to accept the evidence of its own reputation so economists know that there's such a thing as market failure we're not saying anything that any you know first year economic students doesn't know and economists even well economists have for more than a century talked about the problem of so-called external costs so by that we mean if I buy something I go to um the

(41:39) market and I buy this pen I pay a certain amount of money for it it's pretty cheap maybe two bucks something like that but what I'm not paying for is if that factory burned fossil fuels and making this pen and that those fossil fuels put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that warm the planet and cause damages so now a hurricane in North Carolina leads to extreme flooding which does billions and billions of dollars of Damages and I have not paid one penny of the cost of those damages even though this pen

(42:09) contributed to it so that's an external cost and we don't pay those external costs in most cases in in market-based systems this has been known for a long time and there are different ways economists have different ideas for how it could be remedied and this was the idea of having a um putting a price on the external cost was developed by Arthur pigu in the 1920s in the United Kingdom so it's not a new idea it's not a radical thing to say and yet what we find is that climate change deniers by and large are Market fundamentalists who refuse to acknowledge the extent and the scale of

(42:47) the market failure and the external costs and again this is a complicated argument we could get into in detail so why is that why can't they just say okay yeah you're right the are Market failures um and we know how to fix them we put a price on carbon or we put a price or we regulate the marketplace I think the answer to that is that if you really scratch the surface of the climate crisis and this is why I think the market The Merchant of Doubt story remains relevant and important it isn't just about the climate crisis when we

(43:18) wrote our book what we saw was that the merant of Doubt who we first came to know as climate deniers were also tobacco deniers o Zone hold deniers acid rain deniers and so one of the questions is well why why would they deny the science in all these different areas quite different areas and quite outside their own scientific expertise and especially tobacco why would anyone defend tobacco when we know that tobacco has killed a 100 million people in the 20th century um and so the answer to that is this Market fundamentalist argument this fear that if you allow the government to regulate markets it's

(43:56) leading you into to Soviet style dictatorship but I also think there's another aspect of it that is related but I'm going to say it in a slightly different way this is the Achilles heel of modern capitalism as presently practiced right if you begin to pull on that thread and you realize well it's not just carbon dioxide it's also endocrine destructing chemicals it's pesticides it's Plastics and so okay we could put a price on carbon but will we also put a price on pesticides and endocrine disrupting chemicals and

(44:30) plastic and the answer is well we actually probably should because these things are all super damaging as well but suddenly you are looking at a very very regulated Marketplace and something that is really different from the kind of capitalism that we have today and that is not a small thing and so I think it's that Achilles heel element that external cost are really the Achilles heel of market present day market capitalism as practiced but is it about fearing inefficiencies or fearing losing Freedom or fearing you know communism or whatever you call it or knowing that in

(45:09) the US uh communism is uh what France is kind off uh or is it about you know big money in the end like I just want to make more money I just want to have the freedom to protect myself and be a part from society you know how do you balance that I I think it's all of the above I think whenever you see a large scale historical phenomenon it's never going to be just one thing and often when something I mean a way market fundamentalism is a movement and like any social movement people come together under an umbrella possibly for different

(45:43) reasons and so if we go back to the merchants of Dow story for those men it was definitely about communism they were scientists who had helped to build the American weapons and rocketry programs during the Cold War which they understood as having been important in containing communism and in enabling the West to win the Cold War and I think there's no question that they felt that authentically and and many of our readers might agree with that so for them it was about communism they felt that the West had won the Cold War but

(46:16) that market regulation was going to bring in socialism sort of through the back door and they sometimes refer to environmentalists as Reds under the bed they call them watermelons green on the outside but red on the inside so there's this sort of threat of creeping communism and we see that argument being made yet again today in the United States you know one time I gave a talk about Merchant of down I said look we don't even have any Communists left and this was at the University of Wisconsin Madison and one student raised his hand and said excuse me I am a communist okay

(46:47) so I mean the point is we don't have a credible Communist Party in the United States we never really did um but this red baiting element persists and survives but I don't think that's the dominant thing for most market fundamentalists today I think for market fundamentalists today there's more it's really two things it's about privilege and it's about big money so a lot of climate change denial and we and other people have demonstrated this is funded by the fossil fuel industry so even though the merchants of Doubt may not have been motivated by money big money

(47:19) is a huge part of this story because it's what sustains this whole project and certainly that's the case in our new book and the big myth what we show in the book is how captains of industry as I said a few minutes ago really famous names in the history of American Business Like Dupont Sloan um these people are part of their drivers their leaders of this movement and they pay for these propaganda campaigns they pay to bring fun mises and funh to United States they pay to set up the free market project uh at the

(47:53) University of Chicago in order to sustain their position their position of power money and influence and privilege in American society and we I think we're seeing that being recapitulated today now by the big money Silicon Valley Tech Bros you know these billionaires who have made more money than any person could possibly do anything with in a lifetime um and yet somehow still feel as if their you know their prerogatives are being threatened as when Elon Musk you know Elon Musk didn't used to be a reaction uh but he changed and he changed partly

(48:31) during the pandemic I think because he was really outraged that the government thought it had the right to shut down his Factory for the common good and his reaction to that was to say how dare you how dare you question me he a man who had built his fortune on government contracts to build satellites and other space stuff well I want to go into what you describe as a epistemic arrogance as a key barrier to addressing market failures can you explain to me what this is you know how do we break through this I need a moment yeah sure sorry um I just need to take my glasses off uh yes

(49:10) epistemic arrogance could you repeat the question no I so you you describe you know epistemic arrogance as a key barrier to addressing market failures but can you explain to me what this is and how do we break through this uh ideological resistance you know somehow sure well as I've said already a couple of times now these people are not unintelligent and they're not uneducated so if we want to understand how is it then that they can hold these views even though we have so much evidence from history from science um from economics

(49:39) that these views are are at best they're half truths and it worse their lives so part of this I think has to do with the fact that often people in position of privilege live in epistemic bubbles they live in Worlds where the people they talk to believe the same things they do I mean middle class working-class people can have that experience too but the difference is if I'm a workingclass person I don't have the same opportunity to surround myself with people who believe all the same things I do in the way that a very wealthy and privileged

(50:09) person can do a working class person has to ride the Metro to work is going to see the headlines and papers that they maybe don't read but they still see those headlines um a workingclass person will encounter other people in their lives who will challenge their views but really wealthy people can fly in their own private jets surround themselves with people who agree with them go to Invitation Only conferences at DeVos or wherever in which they can be they are more likely to be able to build self-reinforcing networks and environments and that enables them I think more than working in Middle Class

(50:46) people or more even than a college professor who has to mean I have to confront students who disagree and they do actively and that's good um and that makes it I think easier for them to believe that the claims they're making are true and to persuade themselves that they are working for the common good even while they collect 53 billion in salary or whatever it is but some argue also that uh the skepticism toward government is warranted know not arrogant how how do you differentiate between healthy skepticism and uh harmful denial yeah

(51:24) that's a great question of course all of our work is really you know grappling with that question all the time and especially because Eric K and I come at this as from the position of historians of Science and Technology and of course skepticism is absolutely essential to science healthy skepticism curiosity um you know critical interrogation these are core values of Science and one of the thing reasons why I get really angry at climate change deniers is when they try to take the strength of Science and use it against science so climate change

(51:54) Nars will say oh but I'm a skeptic I'm doing something good well but there's healthy skepticism there's corrosive skepticism and there there's denial and so when there's already been a healthy debate when scientists have published huge amounts of data in peer- reviewed literature and written popular books as well lots and lots of Articles and we've had the opportunity to ask the questions that need to be asked at that point if you still reject it that's not healthy skepticism that's something else so when it comes to government so this is obviously a tricky question and again

(52:26) it's why it's why the book is long it's one reason the book is long so obviously a certain amount of healthy skepticism about concentration of power is essential in any Democratic poity and of course the enlightenment ideals the French Revolution the American Revolution uh the work of people like Tom Payne John Lock these are all rooted in healthy skepticism about the risk of overly concentrated power in centralized government but two things I want to say about that everything in life is context dependent so when the biggest threat to Liberty was a monarch a corrupt Monarch

(53:04) um King George III Louis the 16th um you know then of course people are going to be talking about how we have to fight against you know the concentration of power in this corrupt individual But Here we are now more than 200 years later we're in a very different world and in fact one of the ironies of our current situation is that if you ask yourself well when are the greatest concentrations of corrupt power in the world today I think you'd have to say or at least maybe the word corrupt is unfair the greatest concentrations of power that potentially threaten the Democratic poliy it's in corporations

(53:41) it's in big multinational corporations that act with impunity that can break the laws of countries and get away with it that corrupt governments and we see this all around the globe and this is one of the hypocrisies of the current gener ation of Market fundamentalists they're obsessed with government power in a moment where actually I think the biggest threat to the common good the biggest threat to the environment the biggest threat to the climate system I mean the threat to the climate system is not from the US government the threat to

(54:12) the climate system is from exom mobile total BP shell all the fossil fuel companies that are deliberately consciously knowingly continuing to pursue a strategy of fossil fuel development that we know has already disrupted the climate system and has the potential to do huge amounts of damage trillions of dollars of damage every year across the globe and doing that with impunity and no government seems to have the capacity or the wherewithal to stop it well now you have Trump as president-elect you have Elon Musk uh which is leading the libertarian you

(54:50) know Renaissance in the US and uh so basically they they they are taking over in a strong way what what alternatives to Market fun fundamentalism do you envision and what would it take to shift this dominant narrative now well you know they pull a Jiu-Jitsu move on science as I just said using the strength of science against it so I think we have a Jiu-Jitsu move available to us so I think one part of their argument that is correct is about the distribution of power that concentrations of power in any place or any individual can threaten freedom and

(55:28) that's why I make the point that we need to be worried about concentrations of power in multinational corporations so what is the alternative to that well here in the United States one good thing about America is that states have a lot of power and actually cities have a lot of power too and so we can think about this argument about distribution of power and say well that piece of the argument is actually not a bad one there's a lot to be said about the benefits of distribution power and of course people on the left have been

(55:59) saying this for a long time as well this is a place where the right and left sometimes meet so in the United States we have a very robust structure of State governance and states have a lot of power and in fact in some ironic way they may even have more power now based on some of the recent decisions of the Supreme Court so I think that people who are concerned about well any issue healthare climate change workers rights minimum wages much of this can be addressed in the United States on the state level now I don't know as much about France and how

(56:32) much the provinces do or don't have authority but it seems to very little okay so France you have a little bit of a different kind of of course in France you don't have Elam musk so you have other issues of course but I think thinking about the ways in which power can be devolved and I just gave my last lecture of the semester yesterday and this is what I ended the lecture with to think about in the United States I said to my students when I say the word government what you know close your eyes what do you what do you imagine and and they said of course what I knew they would the White House Congress

(57:04) Washington DC and that's true Washington DC has a lot of power but stop and think for a minute we have 50 states with 50 state houses in this country lots of power there that could be used and then I asked my students how many of you have ever even visited a state house no one how many of you know could name one thing that the state legislature in Massachusetts did this week or even this month no one most of us in the United States pay no attention to the levers of power on the state level so that's a

(57:34) giant opportunity for us to rethink how power operates in this country and that's my kind of optimistic um my optimistic vision of a future it's what I would call A Renewed vision of states rights right states rights got really discredited in the United States because it was associated with the defensive slavery but it doesn't have to be that there could be a progressive version of state's rights and which could end up also breaking the the union you know some people say well I don't know I don't want to go there because you know

(58:02) that could be Sous I could be sent to jail yes I'm not saying I want to break up the United States uh but I am saying that a and California's already done it in many ways uh with their climate law ab32 you know one thing the I also like to emphasize the United States um the economy of California is as big as the economy of France so you know if California were C we'd all be celebrating the amazing progress they've made on climate change and it's particularly strange to the United States like Norway does something like

(58:35) you know eliminating internal combustion engines and everyone celebrates and that's good and I love Norway but 7 million people in Norway I mean there's more people than that in New York city so there are tremendous opportunities for action in the United States if we shift our Focus away from you know the president elect and his strange advisers and think about the power we have on other levels last question you got to go um if you could leave listeners with uh one actionable takeway what what would it be uh one

(59:07) action will take away well that's a great question I'm glad you pose it that way because in America I always get ask what can I personally do uh and so I always quote Bill McKibbon who says the most important thing you can do as an individual is not try to solve this problem as an individual but join an organization join a group find common cause with other people who are addressing the problem in a way that feels meaningful for you uh but since you didn't pose it that way um the one actionable thing well I do so the the

(59:35) whole thing about personal action versus political action is complicated because political action ultimately is what is required but can it's a long game and it can feel depressing uh and so sometimes think about what you can do individually is empowering and in the United States the single most important thing that most Americans could do to reduce their carbon footage footprint and also help workers and the environment would be to eat less meat Americans eat about twice as much meat as a typical European has

(1:00:06) huge carbon footprint especially beef terrible for workers huge amounts of pesticides and antibiotics being done do and if we would all just reduce our meat consumption we don't even have to become vegans if we just reduced our meat consumption to what French people uh did we'd be healthier we'd be happier it'd be good for the planet um and then we could drink more wine with the money we save from not eating beef yeah and and that's not against your your your freedom I guess it's not against your fre exactly I'm going to stop there um

(1:00:38) thanks a lot for your time thanks a lot for your insights and uh yeah I'll share the the links to the French version of the of the book on on the as usual okay and you'll of course be did and I think Amanda already sent you the materials right but you will be sure to you know tell people that yes yeah yeah yeah of course excellent I will all right thank you so much so much nice to speak with you take care