Transcript: Podcast with Economist and Anti-Lockdown Activist Gigi Foster

Date of recording: September 19, 2024, The Savvy Street Show

Hosts: Vinay Kolhatkar and Roger Bissell. Guest: Gigi Foster

 

For those who prefer to watch the video, it is here.

Editor’s Note: The Savvy Street Show’s AI-generated transcripts are edited for removal of repetitions and pause terms, and for grammar and clarity. Explanatory references are added in parentheses. Material edits are advised to the reader as edits [in square brackets].

 

Summary

Foster discusses her support for the Great Barrington Declaration, the need for cost-benefit analyses in policy making, and the ethical concerns surrounding gain-of-function research.

In this episode of The Savvy Street Show, host Vinay Kolhatkar and co-host Roger Bissell engage with Professor Gigi Foster, an economist from the University of New South Wales. The conversation explores a range of topics including the rationality of love, the implications of lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of individual autonomy, and the political dynamics surrounding public health policies. Foster discusses her support for the Great Barrington Declaration, the need for cost-benefit analyses in policy making, and the ethical concerns surrounding gain-of-function research. The discussion also touches on the accountability mechanisms in education, the challenges of multitasking, and the current state of climate science. Throughout the conversation, Foster emphasizes the importance of love, freedom, and critical thinking in economics and public policy.

 

Takeaways

1. Love is a process of redefining ourselves.
2. The Great Barrington Declaration offered a reasonable approach to COVID.
3. Cost-benefit analysis is crucial in evaluating lockdowns.
4. Individual autonomy should be prioritized in public health decisions.
5. Political actions during the pandemic were often driven by fear.
6. Power can corrupt and is a potent motivator for individuals.
7. Science has become dogmatic rather than exploratory.
8. Diversity of thought is essential in scientific discourse.
9. Education accountability mechanisms can be gamed by schools.
10. Pragmatic economics should focus on real human needs.

 

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Gigi Foster

02:19 The Rationality of Love

05:53 Pandemic Perspectives and the Great Barrington Declaration

06:20 Cost-Benefit Analysis vs. Individual Autonomy

12:24 Politics, Power, and Pandemic Policies

18:09 The Love of Power and Its Rationality

21:22 Gain of Function Research and Ethical Concerns

24:12 Democratic Mechanisms and Pharmaceutical Oversight

26:13 Accountability in Education: The MySchool Initiative

31:00 Multitasking: Theory and Practical Applications

35:56 Climate Alarmism and the Role of Science

42:12 Influences and Personal Heroes in Economics

46:28 Pragmatic Economics: Beyond Labels

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Hello, and welcome back to The Savvy Street Show. Here we are again with another special guest, and I have my usual co-host with me, Roger Bissell. He’s a writer, musician, and philosopher. Welcome to the show, Roger.

 

Roger Bissell

Thank you, Vinay. Our special guest this evening is Professor Gigi Foster. She is a professor of economics at the University of New South Wales, and she has a BA in ethics, politics, and economics from Yale University and a PhD in economics from the University of Maryland. In 2019, Foster was named the Young Economist of the Year by the Economic Society of Australia. She co-founded a think tank, Australians for Science and Freedom, in 2023, and she is actively involved in the new higher education experiment, Nova Academia. She is a co-author with Paul Frijters and Michael Baker of The Great COVID Panic: What Happened, Why, and What to Do Next, published by the Brownstone Institute in 2021. In the following year, she was co-author with Sanjeev Sabhlok of Do Lockdowns and Border Closures Serve the “Greater Good”? A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Australia’s Reaction to COVID-19, published by Connor Court. Welcome to The Savvy Street Show, Gigi.

 

Gigi Foster

Thank you very much, Roger. It’s a great pleasure to be speaking with you tonight.

 

Roger Bissell

Same here. Well, we’d like to start off with kind of a fun question. I noticed that about seven years ago, you co-wrote a piece in which you explored the question of whether it’s ever rational to be in love. I would presume the answer is, well, maybe sometimes yes, sometimes no, it just depends, you know? Could you briefly share with us your thinking on this question?

 

Gigi Foster

Love is a process of redefining ourselves.

Sure. Well, definitely then, and for probably 10 years prior to that and very much since, I have been very interested in aspects of human motivation and the human condition, which most people wouldn’t necessarily put under the umbrella of economics or economic analysis. Love is one of those. Love, power, loyalty, group influence—and so I study what non-economic, non-monetary incentives might arise from. Our attachments to other people, such as when we fall in love, is certainly one type of source of our incentives. We do many things in our lives because we love other people. So, the question of whether it’s rational to fall in love comes to the question of whether it’s rational to do those other things for other people. My definition of love, which comes from a book I wrote in 2013 with the co-author on that paper as well, Paul Frijters, and on The Great COVID Panic, essentially purports to say that love is a process of redefining ourselves. When we love someone else, our deep brain, somewhere, basically believes that we are, in part, that person, so that when that person is hurt, say a child, we feel hurt. When our spouse is hurt, we feel hurt as well. Or when they’re happy, we feel happy. So, you’re essentially redefining yourself. When you go through life and you constantly have changes in what you love, what you don’t love, you are essentially changing yourself and you’re changing therefore what you care about. So, the question about rationality is really at the beginning of that process, like when you’re 18, let’s say, or 16, or even 10, would you rationally look ahead to your life and say, yes, I would like to open myself to these experiences? I would like to open myself to constantly changing my belief about who I am through my love. And we are social creatures. We are a very social species. So, from the perspective of evolutionary rationality, if you want to say it that way, yes, it is more rational to have that kind of path over your life. If you think about modern definitions of success, they usually include having a spouse, having children. Those things involve love relationships. They involve having status in groups that respect us and presumably having close relationships with colleagues, often in religion and other kinds of ways in which we show loyalty and love. So, love is part of what we think of as success, implicitly. So our answer is, essentially, yes, although traditional notions of rationality might say no, because you would have to be signing up for a little death of yourself in every period as you’re reborn as a new person, as loves develop in your life. So, it’s a complicated answer, but that’s the challenging area about human motivation that I really enjoy and has kept me fired up for this discipline for years and years.

 

Roger Bissell

Thank you.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

You reminded me of Victor Frankl’s research.

 

Gigi Foster

Very much so, yes. The meaning of life.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

If you have a driving mission, you actually live longer. And it reminded me of Roger’s [mission]—he said, music is my muse, and philosophy is my mistress. There you go. He’s got two more loves his wife isn’t jealous of.

 

Gigi Foster

Oh, very much. I think love is absolutely the most important thing in the world. I think that we achieve happiness when we allow ourselves to love and care for things outside ourselves. And that’s something we don’t emphasize in today’s culture very much; and certainly in economics, we don’t emphasize it very much. I’m a little bit unusual as an economist in that.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay, turning then to something for which you became famous, or infamous, in Australia, pandemic and lockdowns. We’re on your side, don’t worry. In October 2020, there was The Great Barrington Declaration by a whole host of allied medical professionals. What did you think of it? And as a social scientist, did you sign it?

 

Gigi Foster

The kind of focused protection that would have been needed could have been maybe not even as much as some of the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration might have imagined it.

I absolutely signed it. I was in communication at that time with a number of people who were pushing against the madness, and I saw this come out and I thought, yes, this is exactly the sort of measured, sane response to this alarmism that we’d seen, and maybe it can get some traction. So, I signed it. I think looking back on it, that still [would have been] a reasonable way to approach COVID—this kind of focused protection. Although if I may be devil’s advocate a bit, it seems that perhaps even that could have been a bit overboard. If we think about what our pandemic management plans said would have been reasonable as a response to COVID back in early March 2020, wholesale lockdowns of whole healthy populations were never on the table because they’re way too costly. The way that COVID looked in the data was really not particularly severe. So, the kind of focused protection that would have been needed could have been maybe not even as much as some of the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration might have imagined it. But it was certainly an extremely important document, and it galvanized much of what I like to call the resistance and restoration movement here in Australia and I think around the world.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you. Yes, maybe they erred on the safe side. [In] the earliest data sample, [a set of] 10,000 people out of China, no one below the age of 20 had died; [and death was] very rare between ages 20 and 30. All the deaths were 60, 70, and over—more in the 80 and over [cohort]. But that makes the argument against lockdowns a kind of cost-benefit analysis that an economist would do. There is, of course, another one, which is individual autonomy and individual decisions that are ours. By all means, we can get advice. If you’re 75, don’t go out. If you’re 25, go out and  live your life as you normally do. Do you follow that kind of individual autonomy/deductive argument, or is it still mainly a cost-benefit analysis?

 

Gigi Foster

The reason to go with the cost-benefit analysis approach in defending why we should reconsider lockdowns, which I did innumerable times in 2020 and 2021 to any medium that would have me, is that people really have trouble arguing against that, if you are conducting your cost-benefit analysis in a currency we can all get behind, like quality of human life years, number and quality of human life years. We want that. Everyone pretty much wants that. We want to be happy; we want to have long lives; we want to have quality lives. That’s the currency I used in my cost-benefit analysis of Australia’s COVID lockdowns. Of course, there has been no parallel analysis submitted anywhere publicly by an Australian government, interestingly. But the currency I used was essentially one of human wellbeing, the wellbeing of life here. It’s never appealed to me to proceed from an axiomatic basis in order to argue for policy. The reason why I believe in preserving and upholding and defending individual freedom is because my analysis of history and of different cultures tells me that the freer one’s choices are throughout one’s life, the better the whole society that creates that freedom ends up being for people. It’s good for people to be free. It’s kind of almost a Golden Rule argument. I don’t want to have my freedoms restricted in terms of things that I could choose that won’t hurt other people. I want to be free to do that, and that’s just going to get the best reaction from everyone who’s involved. If I have to constrain my choices, I’m giving the wrong signals about what I really want to everybody around me because they’re constrained; they’re not really what I want, and then we’re not going to get to as efficient a place socially. So, I’m a very practical person and I suppose Roger might quibble with this, but I’ve always liked the utilitarian style approach.

Now, it can go too far. If you take the example of organs that need to be allocated, a scarce number of organs to an almost infinite number of people who would like them, it seems sometimes in hospitals, if we were to always use the utilitarian argument and give organs to those recipients who would have the longest and in expectation highest quality life years left to live, we’d give all organs to young white women, and that doesn’t sound very good to me. So, you can take it to an extreme as you can with anything. I think there are limits to it, but I do think the cost-benefit argument is inherently more unifying than to say, well, I just believe in X because I do, and so now you should agree with me. I think that’s a harder thing to argue, and it tends to divide because if people don’t agree with you about X, you’re left telling them they have to come up with their own reason to agree with you, and that’s hard work, and you want to make it easy for people to see your argument.

 

Roger Bissell

Well, quibble, moi? I don’t know what I would quibble about. I agree with you. I mean, if freedom didn’t work, then what would be the point of being in favor of it? We do have a lot of facts, a lot of history to point to, and it’s sometimes the history that they don’t want us to look at, you know. [Gigi: Absolutely.] We’d like to think that all these people who want to protect us are only wanting the best for us, and they have good intentions, but we also know there’s a lot of politics involved. You wrote a piece several years ago about politics and the pandemic in Australia, and you referred to some of the policies as a “political game” and “human sacrifice,” I love your phraseology. You also compared it to the ancient practice of, and I’ll quote you here, “killing virgins in the hope of getting a good harvest.” How did the public receive this message? And did you get a lot of pushback from academia or the government or the pharmaceutical companies?

 

Gigi Foster

I appreciate that. That was one of my forays into the mainstream press. I managed to get that op-ed published, but I haven’t gotten many since. There was definitely a hunger on the part of the population here in Australia for something big to be done about COVID, because they were petrified by about mid-March [2020], mid- to late March. They were petrified, and our politicians responded to that. I believe that that was the common pattern around the world. In fact, we talk about that a bit in The Great COVID Panic. It’s not that the government sort of took the first step and said, we’re locking you all down and the people had to sort of deal with it. It’s more that the government, even as late as early March here in Australia, were saying sensible things about COVID, you know, this is kind of a nasty flu if you’re over 50 and maybe have some health problems, but if you’re healthy, you’ll be fine, just take some standard precautions. They were saying normal, regular things about a bug that looked from the data like it was more like the 1957 flu bug than anything else that we’d been exposed to—certainly not the Spanish flu, which was a parallel that was brought up a lot afterwards. But unfortunately, then in mid-March, we had the ICL modeling released. We had all the videography from China, from New York, people falling over in the streets, supposedly dead. People got absolutely panic-stricken here in Australia, so I think what happened is our politicians—as you say, it was a political thing—they followed the politician’s syllogism: “We have to be seen to do something. Here’s something. Let’s do that.” It had no bearing on actually reducing the problem, really addressing the issue at hand fundamentally, in terms of the health issue. All that it had to do with was satisfying the political imperative to take action. It would have been a lot harder for the politicians in Australia to convince people that they had been misled about the severity of the virus, that really it was going to be okay, here are some general tips about keeping your immunity up and staying healthy, if you do have problems, make sure that you do these things. There could have been a lot that was told to people to give them some mastery and some control in the situation in which they were obviously petrified. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, and throughout the ensuing couple of years, it didn’t happen.

When I wrote that op-ed, I think it was about mid-2021, we were going in or had just gone into our huge second lockdown in many of the States in Australia, and it was so frustrating to me because it was clear that these lockdowns had human costs, and they simply were not being taken account of by any of the decision makers who were acting in a political way and not acting to preserve health. That was very clear by that point, even earlier, because so many things could have been communicated that weren’t, like, make sure your vitamin D levels are high enough. Is everybody proning [placing patients on their stomachs, normal standard of care with acute respiratory distress syndrome and effective with COVID] in the hospitals? I mean, there were things that we were starting to learn, and we really could have guessed some of them even before we had data on them because this was basically a coronavirus, the fifth one that we’d encountered and studied in our history with bugs. So, we could have guessed. Then, of course, ivermectin came up and several other things, [including] hydroxychloroquine, all of which were, of course, suppressed. These were cheap, easy ways to deal with this problem that we had faced, which unfortunately would not have been politically as palatable for our leadership, partly because they wouldn’t have been as profitable for the big pharmaceutical companies and bureaucracies that had found themselves in the most powerful positions they’d ever been in.

Throughout history, humans have lied, cheated, killed their own family [members] to retain power.

Power, as you know, as a student of history, is a very, very potent aphrodisiac. People love power. They will do anything to keep and retain power. It is a hard drug. Throughout history, humans have lied, cheated, killed their own family [members] to retain power. So, to me, [this] was an amazing example from Aristotle’s politics. Essentially, a “pleasing mask,” I think are his words, a pleasing disguise was put upon this set of actions, which was: “preserve the health of the society. You don’t want to kill your grandma, do you? Do it for your citizens.” That was a manipulative technique to basically weaponize people’s love for each other, which I find very offensive. I’ll be talking about that exact phenomenon next month at a TEDx talk. And people went right along with it.

Did I get pushback? Yes, I did. Because I was seen as the neoliberal Trumpkinaut, “death-cult warrior,” the person who wanted to kill Granny. I basically found myself very much in the cold in my own profession. There were people who in my own department were madly advocating for lockdowns and this precautionary principal excuse that was used, which we can talk about if you like. So yes, there was definitely a hunger for the lockdowns, a support of those politicians who implemented the lockdowns, landslide political victories for Dan Andrews, Premier of Victoria, and Mark McGowan, Premier of Western Australia, during the COVID years. We still have yet to really face facts about what happened for lots of reasons that we can also talk about. So yes, it was a weird time, that’s for sure.

 

Roger Bissell

You mentioned the love of power and I wondered if you regard the love of power as being rational?

 

Gigi Foster

Well, that’s an interesting question. You have to really think about how uber-reflective people are. My approach to power has always been to try to avoid it because I can see how corrupting it is. I really like my position in a university where I don’t have funding from anybody but the Australian taxpayer and students. I don’t take industry grants, and I don’t even have money from the government to do any particular projects. I just go along and do my thing. I have a think tank, as you mentioned, that was voluntary. I stay away from [power]. But it’s like an addict. Is it rational to get addicted to heroin? Probably not, because your life will fall apart eventually. But in the short run, it feels great. Unfortunately, that’s what people who have this large degree of power on offer that seems to be beckoning to them might succumb to if they don’t recognize the kind of ultimate existential danger of doing that. I mean we were told about this in Lord of the Rings. Gollum, he’s right there for us to see. We just have to be aware of that. So, again, it depends on your definition of rationality.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

I’d like to be a dictator who sets everyone free.

 

Gigi Foster

Right. I’ve heard that one before. If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

I recall even [regarding] methylene blue and the origin of the virus; methylene blue as a curative and as a prophylactic was neglected. [The results] had been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Unlike [in the case of] ivermectin, they suppressed the publications directly. [Results on] NAC [N-Acetyl L-Cysteine, an antioxidant supplement that helps break down mucus in the body and promotes lung health and immune function] were also published. It [NAC] was available over the counter, so I bought it, because I couldn’t buy ivermectin and it [NAC] did help me in my [bout with] COVID. But let’s go right back to the origin. There’s just a couple of quotes I’m going to start the question with. One is from King’s College, London. 59 labs around the world handle the deadliest pathogens, like the Wuhan lab, and only a quarter of them scored high on safety. Then there is another one; I’m not going to say the year at first, but the paper is a PMC [PubMed Central] paper in the US. It’s called “The Ethics of Biosafety Considerations in Gain of Function Research.” The authors state that research raises ethical concerns because of the risk that accidental release from a lab could lead to extensive or even global spread of a virulent pathogen. It was written in 2015, and the US did shut down funding of bioresearch for about three years, but then it came right back up. Is that something you’ve done an economic analysis on, which is like a cost-benefit analysis of this [gain of function] research?

 

Gigi Foster

I haven’t done that, but I think that would be a great PhD thesis.

I haven’t done that, Vinay, but I think that would be a great PhD thesis. You know, I only have so many hours in the day. I’m constantly thinking of—I mean, it’s so obvious—how many studies badly, desperately need to be done to uncover and push forward our understanding of what happened during this time and how we can best proceed from here. I do think that the profit motive is very strong, and the profit motive to potentially find cures for things that, oh, whoops, that happen to have escaped—that is very strong. Unfortunately, unless we have a more population-responsive mechanism to regulate the pharmaceutical industry, we are not going to get that kind of oversight that will actually be reflective of people’s real needs, real health needs. For example, here in Australia, we have the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and TGA, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, and AHPRA, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency—all these different bodies. They get huge amounts of funding, at least particularly the ones that are making decisions about, for example, “should we buy lots and lots of COVID vaccines and then push hard for them to be distributed to everybody in Australia?” They get lots of funding from the biopharmaceutical companies, and they are headed by people who were political appointees. That’s going to lead eventually to the kind of disaster that we have seen.

So, in my view, we need to do a lot more to revive direct democratic mechanisms in our supposedly democratic Western societies, because that has been lost. We think we have some control over the people who are in power, government authorities, because we vote. But voting is simply not enough anymore, not in these humongous representative democracies, so-called, that we have. Democracy in the time of the Greeks was very, very different from democracy in the time of COVID, right? So I’m proposing on many of the blogs I write on Brownstone.org, with my co-authors, Paul Frijters and Michael Baker, some mechanisms that we could try to push for that would increase the voice of the people as a whole, rather than just the voice of the elites in power, in the resource allocation decisions that are done by people at the heads of the machinery of state in our countries. So yes, I do think, of course, that this gain-of-function stuff looks dangerous to me. I also do believe in the resilience of the human organism. I believe we can actually fight off a lot of things in the longer run. Nature finds a way; life finds a way. I really do believe that. But of course, I want to avoid damage, and I don’t really see the upside of a lot of that kind of research. If there were an upside that was significant for humans, then I think we should consider it, but I haven’t seen yet anything convincing that leads me to think that this is a really good idea to shove a lot of money into.

 

Roger Bissell

[Education is] another area where we think about powerful elites who are trying to do what’s good for us, and we always welcome experts to analyze these things. Sometimes, you’d like to think that—well, what can I as an individual do? Like the little old lady or gentleman in tennis shoes going up to the state capitol or the courthouse and protesting with a sign or talking at the public hearings. I used to do a bit of this here in Nashville, trying to influence the school board when they came up with their latest new budget where they wanted to have millions of dollars more. Of course, that means tax dollars, and you wonder, is it going to do any good? Sometimes not only do you wonder, am I getting my money’s worth, but exactly what are they doing? Like the textbook issues, the classroom policies, and not just is the money being spent well, but is it maybe a harmful policy? When parents go in and talk at these hearings, does it work? You wrote a piece about whether the school boards or the principals are going to actually be open and responsive to this kind of attention and scrutiny, not just by parents, but also if it gets out in the news or on the television. Does it work? Does it move the needle? What are your findings on this?

 

Gigi Foster

Yes, you’re referring to a paper I wrote with my colleague Mick Coeli at the University of Melbourne that came out earlier this year. We study a mechanism that was touted as, in a sense, a kind of democratic accountability mechanism in a way. It was to start publishing on the World Wide Web, the NAPLAN results—that’s the National Assessment in Literacy and Numeracy in Australia, so basically, national tests in both math and English—publishing results by school for anybody to see, parents, teachers, children, whatever. The way that that information was presented showed for each school what the average score was on literacy and numeracy—there are five different domains, four of literacy and one of numeracy—and for all the year-groups that are tested, year three, five, seven, and nine. That was already a lot of data. And not just your school’s average, but also how well you performed relative to schools that had a similar mix of kids—so, similarly socioeconomically advantaged. Not a perfect measure of socioeconomic advantage, but some way of adjusting a little bit. Of course, you wouldn’t be surprised to know that schools in really wealthy areas do better, even if that was just because the kids are in homes that have more books, and they have more resources and all sorts of other advantages.

This was touted as a thing that was going to assist in sniffing out the schools that weren’t performing very well and putting competitive pressure on them to either lift their game or close, because the parents would see that those schools weren’t doing very well, and they would move their kids to other schools, or put pressure on the principals, whatever. This was called MySchool, this website that went live in, I believe, 2010. What we looked at is whether this had an impact on the fraction of kids who actually sat for the test, who actually took the tests each year. What we thought was, we want to make sure that at least those measures are not suffering from a selection problem, because we saw that there could be an incentive for a school that looks bad on the test to not have the kids who it expects to be poor performers actually take the test the next year, because then their average will come up. That is essentially the story that we find some evidence for, and we find it specifically for schools that look bad relative to their peer schools, not just overall, but relative to peers, which was arguably a more potent and more complete new piece of information that parents got in 2010 through MySchool. We also find that that tends to be true more so for the private schools, which tend to charge a lot of money for the privilege of parents sending their kids there.

All we see is that the percentage of kids withdrawn from testing is higher in later years for schools that look bad in the earlier years.

Now, we’re not sure exactly how this happens, whether it’s the parents [who], for some reason, start to be loyal to the school and they think, gee, my kid is going to bring the average down, I better hold him back. Or whether it’s the principal who has conversations with the parents and says maybe it’s better if he doesn’t sit this year because we need to not stress him out, or whatever. Whatever the conversation is, we can’t observe that stuff. All we see is that the percentage of kids withdrawn from testing is higher in later years for schools that look bad in the earlier years. We have a lot of graphs that show that this is what’s happening, and this to us is essentially evidence of a bureaucratic loophole. When we put this accountability mechanism online, nobody in the Department of Education realized that without a minimum fraction of kids sitting the test, you’re going to end up potentially opening an avenue for schools to game the system by holding more kids back.

Now, even that as a response is probably not optimal because you then may incentivize other problems. So one thing I have proposed in the media coverage of this paper here in Australia is that we could ask the MySchool website to publish, as well as the averages and how well the schools are doing, the fraction of kids who actually sat the test in each of those years, because then at least parents have more information and they could potentially see, over the course of these years, this school has been having fewer students sit, or they have fewer students sitting this year than other comparable schools. Maybe I smell a rat. That’s kind of the most that we could potentially do that I don’t think would change incentives too much.

 

Roger Bissell

I see. Well, now here’s something completely different. As I was looking over your various publications, I saw one that you co-edited on multitasking, on the economics of multitasking. Vinay and I often find ourselves wearing multiple hats, and sometimes we meet ourselves coming and going, there’s a lot to do, and sometimes it’s different areas of work, sometimes it’s work and personal life, and so on. I haven’t read the book yet, so I’m asking out of ignorance, basically, is it more theory or is there some practical takeaway from some of the pieces at least? It’s an economic issue. Is it also a practical issue that’s discussed?

 

Gigi Foster

We do, of course, talk about the practical applications of multitasking in our lives. This is with my co-author, co-editor, Charlene Kalenkoski, who is now at James Madison University. We were really inspired to write this book, or to edit this book and write the introductory and concluding chapters because, as working mothers, very busy people, we have found ourselves often multitasking, just like you were saying. I do find myself wearing many, many hats, even though my children are now grown and out of the house. Good people are very busy these days, as I like to say, so you have to find a way to cope with that, and you can see some people fall off the rails because they just can’t, they get overwhelmed. It’s not a psychological text, so we do not provide a self-help dimension to the discussion, but we do have some theory, and we do have some applications to particular areas.

One of the papers we have compares how well men and women are able to multitask in a lab experiment setting where we try to control as much as we can and get to whether or not men and women are able to equivalently multitask. Funnily enough, what we find is that—we have a pretend baby-care task and also a clothes-sorting task, organized through icons on the screen—the women are really disturbed when the baby starts crying, and they kind of attend to it more, while the men aren’t as disturbed by that, it seems, so they don’t change their behavior in the clothes-sorting task as much. But is it true that men aren’t as good at multitasking (which is the urban legend)? My personal, anecdotal experience has been that it probably is to some extent true. There probably is an average difference between the genders, but as with so many things, there’s so much more variation within gender than across gender in a lot of realms of our life that I don’t enjoy really talking a lot about people by their group status. I think that is ultimately quite divisive, and I very much see myself as a human being who’s just trying to maximize her potential and her contribution to the world. Yes, I’m a woman, of course, but that doesn’t really form a big part of my self-concept in a professional sense certainly, so I try to encourage that by my own ways of talking about my research. Even though there is that little analysis of male versus female difference, which we did because we know that people want to know that, it’s still much more an analysis of just what does this do when there is a multitasking problem? What does that do to the decision maker?

Is real multitasking possible? From a psychological standpoint, the answer is no. We do have to do task switching.

I think you were saying before the show, you were interested to know whether real multitasking is possible. From a psychological standpoint, the answer is no. We do have to do task switching. It’s a very, very fast task switching that happens at a neurological level. At least that’s our understanding at the moment, given the current frontier. So really when you see a good multitasker, what you’re seeing is somebody who can task switch extremely efficiently, as opposed to somebody who has to kind of reorient and reuptake all the heuristics to deal with task A, and then, okay, down tools, pick up the heuristics for task B, and now we go. Some people just have automated more of those heuristics and habits of thought so they can quickly switch between them.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

I think I fit the wrong side of multitasking. I leave a project unfinished, and I jump to another one and another one, and then come back rather than stay on it till it’s finished.

One more thing which has two levels of argument, it’s a very big thing, this whole climate alarmism and Net Zero. Yes, you can take a cost-benefit analysis rather than an axiomatic liberty analysis. You can also say, the [declared] science doesn’t stand up against scrutiny by real scholars and true scientists. Do you have an opinion, either from an economist’s perspective or on the science itself from what you’ve seen?

 

Gigi Foster

Yes, I think the thing that is most important to bear in mind with the climate stuff and also with many other modern fashions and fads, including COVID actually, the gender wars, lots of different things, is that we somehow in the modern world have lost touch with what science really is. We’ve now replaced science with dogma in many disciplines, and many scientists themselves don’t actually appreciate now what science classically is defined as, and they now act more like religious proselytizers. You see this in the fanatical marrying to particular models and simulations that come out of computers that obviously simplify reality for the sake of tractability, which is something that economists do all the time. I teach my students this is a great advantage because you then can think about a problem, but it does not mean that your model is right. All models are wrong. We have that saying in economics: all models are wrong, some are useful. To the extent that you are going to feed into policy recommendations from a simulated model, you have to be extremely humble about that. You have to know, look, my model really might not be anticipating lots of different factors in this complex world that I don’t yet understand. That kind of humility was expressed, for example, by Jacob Bronowski in the wonderful BBC documentary series called “The Ascent of Man” back from 1973. He beautifully articulates this issue that just is missing from so many scientific pronouncements and communiques these days, and even interpretations.

The lay journalist or person on the street does not understand that a stylized model or a simulation is not itself science. Science is the continual perennial interplay between theory and empirical data in an attempt to move closer and closer to a truth that will never actually be reached. We cannot ever completely understand everything about our world, whatever area we are hyperspecialized in, which is of course another problem. People are so specialized that they often can’t understand each other, so we have journalists taking some scientist’s pronouncement  as [being] the QED, the end, the final word on a topic, even when that scientist is really just saying: “Here’s my model, here’s what it predicts, and it’s very bad, therefore we should do some things.” There’s no critical analysis anymore, there’s no sense of, “Maybe I’ve not included everything.” This kind of conceit in science, I think, can lead us down really, really dangerous paths in terms of our policy. So the key is to try to preserve diversity of perspective, diversity of thoughts, critical comments about whatever is being discussed, such that we can hopefully shake out the bad ideas and the models that may have issues, and that we can really understand what the limitations are of the various analytical tools that we’re using, because otherwise we construct policy based on fabricated ideas of what the world is now or what it’s going to be in the future. So, we always need to tether to data, and we always need to invite and welcome and nurture diversity of thought. One of the things I’ve suggested is that governments should actually actively support alternative schools of thought, actively fund them, because they are so rare these days.

We have so much suppression of dissenting opinion in science and in the public space at large, so I think that’s a real danger and that that perpetuates this problem of the conceit in science and the kind of headiness, the powerful kind of feeling that scientists have when they’ve got some model. Imagine Neil Ferguson in mid-March 2020. That would have been a massive high for him. “My gosh, the whole world is looking at my model and how many people are going to die, and wow, I’m so important. Like, look at what I’ve done.” Never mind that the guy was wrong every time in the past when he tried to predict how many people would die from pandemics or viruses or any bug, right? I mean, massively wrong. Never mind that. And people didn’t seem to care about that at the time either, right? It’s a really nasty brew of power and conceit and laziness and hyperspecialism and a kind of hunger for something to believe in and something to make your life meaningful. So, when somebody believes one of these dogmatic, religious sorts of ideas, like the world is going to burn in 50 years if we don’t right now kill a lot of people, it gives them something to push for, something to hope for, and something to belong to. People really want that. Another antidote, therefore, is to find someplace else for them to get it than in these catastrophe-ridden, doomsday-saying sorts of religious diktats.

 

Roger Bissell

Yes, models are tricky and questionable enough even if they’re the latest version, but our car’s GPS is seven years out of date, and we [recently] went on a 2000-mile trip, and I second-guessed that puppy every day.

I have one more question that I’d like to ask you, and this is just a wide-open question. When I’m thinking about the philosophers and the scientists and so on that influenced me, I have some that I regard as heroes and some as provocateurs and some I just got a good education from. So, tell us some of the economists and philosophers and so on that influenced you the most, or that even rose to the level of your personal heroes.

 

Gigi Foster

I received a philosophy book when I was about 13 which made a deep impression, which was Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.

Well, I’ve had many influences in my life, as you can imagine, including my parents, one a psychologist, one an engineer, and they both influenced [me in] the way that I think about the world and the objective that I see in the world, which is to maximize happiness for everybody, essentially. But in terms of people who are outside my family who have really influenced me, I received a philosophy book when I was about 13 which made a deep impression, which was Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. It’s still my favorite book as a sort of expression of meaning and purpose in life and the way that we can try to take stock of what our societies are like and try to give the best guidance to people in those societies for achieving happiness and love. So that, I think, is a big one. I also very much respect and admire Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Sowell, Viktor Frankl—we spoke of him before—people who have endured struggles in their lives and come out of the other side and continued to have a sane and compassionate perspective on society as a whole and have tried to push for policies that would promote peace and a rational kind of efficient and responsible stewardship of the scarce resources we have, which of course is the economic problem as it’s often taught to students. You know, you want to allocate resources efficiently. You don’t want to have waste. Whenever you see money being wasted, it’s like you’re burning what you could have had—and that often is human happiness. I see that very strongly.

I would also honestly say: my co-author, Paul Frijters. We’ve been writing together for 20 years, and it’s been a wonderful intellectual partnership. I would encourage people in the sciences to partner with people who have similar aims but slightly different perspectives and skill sets, because you can build a kind of trusting space where you can literally say anything and think anything and get a realistic and helpful, productive soundboard from that other person. That’s what we’ve been to each other for a long time. I really appreciate that. And of course, my partner, my children, everybody who I inflict my ideas on and experiment with, really. When I was studying love, I was adjusting things in my own life and seeing what would happen to my feelings of love, to their feelings of love. You’ve got to use yourself as a source of introspection if you’re a scientist.

Charles Darwin would be another person in my list, an incredibly amazing human being, taking that risk to go all the way over to the other side of the world, not really knowing what he was going to find, just knowing generally what he was interested in, observing everything he could, making connections across multiple different fields he’d seen things in and coming back and stewing on things, having concern that he had rejected the faith he’d been brought up in by believing now maybe evolution was the thing rather than creation, and then taking 20 years to write up his results. He wouldn’t qualify as a scientist today, according to a lot of rules that we have to play by, but boy, I think he was probably the greatest scientist in history.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you. Last question from me, just kind of defining you as an economist. You spoke about certain ideas that just get canceled in this New World, and then you’re arguing for some to be allowed. And it was kind of [like that] in economics, there was an Overton Window, and Milton Friedman was at the right end of the Overton Window, and I discovered there’s quite a lot to the right of Milton Friedman: [Ludwig von] Mises and [Murray] Rothbard and Carl Menger, to name a few, and Henry Hazlitt. So, where would you place your economics? Is it in the free market space, Chicago School, Austrian School, or neither of those?

 

Gigi Foster

Look, I don’t love labels, I really don’t. I try to pick and choose the policies that I think have stood the test of time and that are suitable to the modern world. You’re right about timing of things, Hayek and Friedman in the seventies, rising up because people were seeing the evidence, economic stress of the policies around that time, and so they wanted a different way. I’m hopeful that that is essentially what we will discover within the medium run in our time—a frustration with the way things are now and a hunger for a different way. I think to build that different way, we do need to draw on free-market ideas for sure, but we also need to draw on realisms about power and loyalty and the other human motivations in order to build institutions that suit real human beings, rather than the cardboard cutouts that are often used in economic models, whether on the kind of freshwater or saltwater side of the fence.

I love Henry Hazlett’s Economics in One Lesson. I recommend that to my students all the time.

I’m a really, really, highly practical person. I love Henry Hazlett’s Economics in One Lesson. I recommend that to my students all the time. I love a lot of those writers, but as well as I stay away from power, I try to stay away from ideology for its own sake. I really want to continue to stay grounded in challenging myself [on] any policy I recommend: “Is it really the best for human beings, given everything I know right at this time?—and not to pursue utopia too much. You always want to move forward towards something better, but often, economists argue about whether we’re here or there [gestures at two points], the politicians are down here [gestures at a point well away]. All you need to do is move them in that direction generally. It doesn’t really matter which of these two it is. Just get them to go that way. So that’s something I’ve really taken to heart. I try to get my students to understand that if you can just be relevant and sensible and be able to speak to politicians about ideas that have stood the test of time—of course, including free-market principles and liberty—then you can make a positive difference in this world.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Well, we’ve run out of time, so thank you for being here. And to the viewers out there, keep tuning in to The Savvy Street Show. That will make you savvy about the world around here. Good night and good luck.

 

Gigi Foster

Thank you.