Subscribe and Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | YouTube
Transcript
Rob Johnson:
I’m here today with Richard Vague, who not only is an INET board member, but an author and was the secretary of banking and securities in the state of Pennsylvania. And just a person who I think has a tremendous amount of insight into political economy, into the institutions and the history, as we’ll learn today, related to business. His Brief History of Doom, was I thought, perhaps the most illuminating book that I have read about the history of financial crises and what you can foresee. That it is all in the realm of policymaking, a shock that nobody could see coming, he shows us lots of ways to see things coming. But I’m very interested in his new book, The Illustrated Business History of the United States. Richard, thanks for joining me. And I guess we’ll start with what inspired you to write this book?
Richard Vague:
Well, first, I have to say thank you to you for having me here today. Yours is a great podcast and I’ve enjoyed so many of the things that you’ve put forward. It’s a privilege to be here. With all our research on financial crisis, one thing that became clear was there really wasn’t a lot of data or information about early American business history. We could find fragments of it here and there, and I had real curiosity about how sophisticated or unsophisticated the beginnings of US business were. Going back to the Constitution in 1787, the first bank in the United States and so forth.
And so we confirmed that not much had been put together in terms of the hard data about manufacturing, banking and the like. And we proceeded to put that together. Now, we did a lot of fun things along the way, we reconstructed lists of who the wealthiest individuals were in each era. What imports and exports were, the key inventions. But we had to do a lot of digging to find the early American business history.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. And you carried on that, how do I say? Multifaceted expression, right up through 2015. So we get to see the what you might call modern incarnation of the tradition of innovators and leaders. And even I got to shed a tear, because I watched the decline in the size of the city of Detroit where I grew up. Because each chapter you show where are the largest cities. And Detroit drops right out of the top 10. But I thought the, how do I say? Relative to many scholarly histories, this was much more accessible. The modes of connection that you created with visual things, with people with personalities, as well as with the structure of commerce was very exciting.
And I must say I was very inspired when I got home last night, because I had taken my children to Amagansett, New York to the marine museum of this area around Long Island in the Hamptons, and they had spent the afternoon studying whaling and fishing. And going back to the 19th century and what you might call the prelude to Moby-Dick. So called Heart of the Sea, Nathaniel Philbrick’s book and all of these things and looking at the row boats and looking at the pictures of the different people and the testimony, I felt like I got a running start to your… But a running start into a middle chapter, but…
Richard Vague:
The whaling industry was a fascinating and a very large industry.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah. And had to chase all over the planet. They were telling us stories about people leaving from Nantucket or Sag Harbor, had to go around Cape Horn and up to the Pacific to find whales after a certain point in time.
Richard Vague:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Rob Johnson:
So what is it that you see… One of the things that I think is very interesting right now, a lot of people are obviously very concerned about climate change. And there is one school of thought, which is talking us though, we have to reset our preferences. And we have to, how do I say? Govern properly, part of which is setting incentives. But the other is a look into what the private sector, the deliver of these commodities and services, and in this case transformation, bring to bear. And the acknowledgement that large business organizations are often the vehicles of change. They have to work perhaps in conjunction with government or what have you, but I’m curious, I guess the meta question is about the dance between the private sector and the state that you saw evolve through the chapters.
Richard Vague:
Well, that’s a great question and a great subject, because there’s a lot of folks, particularly over the last couple of decades that talk about laissez-faire and get government out of the way of business and business will seek and find the right things to do. And when you look at American history, it’s never been that way. There was never this mythical laissez-faire period of American business. American business has I think, largely benefited from what you might call an industrial policy since the very beginning.
Alexander Hamilton, when he wrote his famous three reports in 1790 and ‘91, one of the things he boosted as part of that was manufacturing. Well, he was instrumental in seeking talent from the UK, to bring to the United States, sometimes in contravention to British law, by the way, to populate a new industrial sector within the United States. We see the United States government taking a huge position, by the way, through the federal and through the state governments. Huge position in canals, the fledgling railroad industry was a huge beneficiary of government support at the Illinois Central Railroad and the Transcontinental Railroad and many, many other places. We bring that all the way to today, we see, and I think the work of a number of economists have shown this where even the iPhone, all the major sub components of the iPhone have come directly or indirectly from government sponsored research or government policy and the like. The internet itself, obviously, the old ARPANET, that’s touchscreen technology, that’s GPS. That’s the like.
So the US government has strategically pointed business in certain directions throughout US history, which to me means it could do it again. And it can do it relative to things like climate change. And as daunting an issue as that is, I think there’s hope if we can align government and business around that issue.
Rob Johnson:
I’ve seen a number of examples as I was listening to you it occurred, a gentlemen, the late Felix Rohatyn, had a book called Bold Endeavors, which was about I think 10 or 11, I think it was 11 cases of where the state had made a difference. Highway systems, canals among others. And that interface between the state is very prominent in our fellow board member, Bill Janeway’s new series on the INET website about the economics of innovation and venture capital. His father wrote a book about war preparation, The Struggle for Survival, Eliot Janeway about the Roosevelt years preparing for World War Two.
So there’s a lot of precedent, but I think there’s something that’s very interesting right now, that’s a formidable challenge, which is, for many years, say at the time of Polanyi’s Great Transformation, people were talking about more state or less state and people on the left where the more state. In recent years, there’s been a cynicism about the role of money in politics. And many people on the left, in surveys show that they have no confidence that the state is any longer representative of the well being of people. That it’s been captured. The financial bailout in the great financial crisis was a lightning rod of suspicion in that regard. And I don’t think myself, and you’re welcome to differ with me, that we could have stood by and not done the bailout. I think everybody would have gone down with the ship and we had to preserve the financial sector in order to have a chance for recovery and repair.
But nonetheless, that cynicism, whether it’s in Gallup polls or books like Ben Page writes suggesting that surveys where the top 10% of the population differs from the bottom 90 in terms of wealth or income, that the legislature follows the top 10%’s recommendations all the time. And so how are we… I guess I’m asking you in a long-winded way, how do we jumpstart trust in the state, as a leader here again?
Richard Vague:
I think you’ve just described one of the most difficult problems I can think of. If folks are cynical about business, if folks are cynical about government’s involvement in business, they have a lot of justification for having that view. From the very beginning of US business history. And probably back as far as we can look in time, there has been corruption, there has been fraud. For every great victory and great advancement that businesses brought, there have been many things that go in the other direction. And for every enlightened thing that government has done, there has been an equal number of areas where government has produced outcomes that aren’t that desirable. So there’s a lot there that would create the cynicism that folks might feel. Nevertheless, the examples of where good has been achieved are glorious. And I think the burden, and personally, I think the burden is on government to do some good things. Because that alone will create a cycle that will reinforce our ability to trust government.
And the cynicism is deep-seated. As you and I have discussed, I’ve spent a lot of time going around the country talking to folks, middle Americans or average Americans about that, and the cynicism and distrust is there. And it’s pervasive. And I think it’s time for government to step up and do some really profoundly good things. I think that’s the kind of thing that can set things right.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. I think the, obviously the Biden administration espoused what you may call the awareness of that challenge, particularly after the January sixth problems around the Capitol. And seeing people on both sides of the aisle, if you will, expressing concern and cynicism. I guess we’ve got within the legislature, within the two party system, we’ve got to get over some of the rivalrous propensities and rally together to realize that proof.
But there’s a lot of what you might call cocktail party cynicism, even among elites now as to whether this can be achieved, but everybody’s yearning for it. Everybody’s yearning for some good news. And one of the things I found refreshing about this book is that we can get a little too caught in our zoom lens, what’s going on now and what are we suspicious of. But to see those cycles of what you might call the marvelous and the excess and how it evolves, is refreshing. It’s not necessarily all bad news.
Richard Vague:
Yeah. There’s a lot of good there.
Rob Johnson:
You’ve got 14 chapters in the book, different segments in time, it’s chronological. Where did you find the most excitement in… Who did you admire as people? What sectors in their development were most positively surprising, as you conducted this study?
Richard Vague:
Well, there’s a lot of obvious heroes. Thomas Edison, with his tasseled hair and his absent mindedness was certainly a great example. I look back, one of the individuals that has become one of my favorites is Thomas Willing, who was the first great banker in the United States, going back all the way to the beginning. So there’s a lot of great things that have happened.
To me, there’s a lot of business history that we know very, very well. The boom in the ’20s and the crash in the Great Depression, everybody knows that story. The manufacturing being marshaled to help World War Two. Everybody knows that story. So my areas that were the favorite for me in the book were the less traveled paths, the business around circa 1900 and 1910. There was as much going on there as in any period of history, it’s just an area that folks haven’t spent a lot of time in. The great canal era in 1830s, something most folks aren’t aware of. So I think the book really, my most fun in the book was exploring areas that I had less familiarity with.
Rob Johnson:
Was there ever a place that you discovered that you had come into it thinking it was good news and found out it really wasn’t so good?
Richard Vague:
Well, I think I came out of the ’80s. My first job in banking was in the late 1970s. And I was present in the ’80s, the era of Reagan. And I think today, many folks still look back at that as was expressed in his campaign, Morning in America and a resurgence and this that the other.
Rob Johnson:
That’s morning without the U, right?
Richard Vague:
Well said. But at any rate, to go back and examine it, you find that that was one of the most crisis-laden periods in American history. And so that was one of the obvious ones to me that where what I found was very different than I think, the popular perception.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, I’ve worked in the United States Senate Banking Committee as their chief economist in the late 1980s and the, how do I say? The unfolding of the savings and loan crisis and the ‘87 stock market crash and various concerns about derivatives or the integrity of the relationship between futures exchanges and the stock exchanges. All these things were emerging. And-
Richard Vague:
It was a brutal period.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, really was. And then more recently, I saw you talk about how what you might call the commercialization of entertainment played a big role in recent years. And I saw a picture of Jay-Z in the book and Oprah Winfrey and lots of other people from that, how do I say? That sector. What helped them accelerate? Is it related to technology? Or is it the advent of television, which I guess is another phase of technology. What brought entertainment to the surface or to the leadership role?
Richard Vague:
Well entertainment has obviously been there all along. But it seems to me as I looked at the history that, let’s call it the first two thirds or the first 75% of American business history was about improving the daily lives and generating wealth broadly across the economy. And I think we probably hit an apex, in the decades right after World War Two, but it was about fulfilling the basic needs of the population, food, transportation and the like. And that’s where the big industries were. But then at some point in time, we reached this very wealthy phase, we really became an extraordinarily wealthy country and that was broadly experienced across the population.
And to me, that marks a transition in business history, where instead of taking care of the sustenance of life, we’re entertaining people. And we entertain people with television, we entertain people with drugs and with food. And we entertain people with controversy, as we see on cable television. So it’s almost a period and where… The big companies of today, take Facebook, that’s about folks gossiping. That’s not about meeting some basic survival need of people, it’s about teenagers gossiping, it’s about very false rumors being spread. Well, that’s just a business that was difficult to conceive of 50 or 100 or 150 years ago. We’ve become a nation where a huge component of business is just about entertaining the populace more than anything else.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. The rise of tunnelization. And-
Richard Vague:
The rise of… I love that.
Rob Johnson:
I guess it’s interesting to bring that into focus as I’m listening to you, in relation to the health care industry, where people feel something is inadequate and very expensive that is essential, while tunnelization is almost like a diversionary tactic. And I’m very interested what your thoughts are on the horizon now. If you were to forecast for me that we’ll come back together in 15 years on the 15th chapter of your book, what’s at the cutting edge right now? What’s going to blossom in this next phase?
Richard Vague:
Well, I want to pick up on something you said there, the healthcare industry and the growing importance of the healthcare industry. The irony here is that much of what we’ve done over the last generation or so, the result has been to make the health of Americans worse. Big food, we’re eating Froot Loops and Cheetos. That was the big innovation of the big food industry. The pharmaceutical industry, which we go into detail about in the book, all of a sudden, one of the biggest selling drugs out of the pharmaceutical industry is Valium. It’s not a drug to take care of infections or to cure cancer, this had, it’s something to take care of depression. Well, that’s a manifestation of, I think, the fact that much of what we’re doing to provide things to a wealthy country, don’t really help that country, make it a less healthy.
And I think we’ve seen more recently that even before COVID, that the average lifespan of American citizens was declining, for the first time in history. Part of that was the opioid epidemic, well, that was a function of business. So our trends on healthcare are not to be envied. We’re getting less healthy, the healthcare system is, as we all know, fairly dysfunctional. There’s no easy path to get from here to there.
But when I think about the future, a lot of it is a bit around healthcare and a lot of it is around genetic engineering. This is an area that has opened up, radical breakthroughs are occurring, not only to cure diseases like cancer, but perhaps, eventually to alter ourselves physically. Maybe there’s genetic re-engineering to create a desired characteristic that we don’t have.
So I think a lot of the future is going to be about altering ourselves, both as it relates to genetic engineering and also as it relates to creating a digital environment where we live more and more of our lives digitally instead of physically. The great futurist, Ray Kurzweil talks about the fact that we are going to be… This is a radical thought, by the way, and I haven’t really gotten my head around this, but it’s about we’re going to actually begin living our lives as avatars instead of in our physical bodies. Will that be true 20 or 40 or 60 years from now? Ray certainly thinks it will be. So I think altering our reality, both genetically and digitally will dominate what happens to us over the next several generations.
Rob Johnson:
That’s fascinating. And I know there’s a summary statistic I see come out of the OECD with relation to healthcare, which is that the United States is ranked 38th in terms of the quality of health care and yet its cost is almost double the OECD average. And is by far and away the most expensive. So there’s something, not, how do I say? Not working well. And I’ve often advocated, I started my career working in the Republican Party under Pete Domenici, that my hawkish friends ought to examine things like the better models of healthcare, to help trim the government budget. It’s not just about oppressing people at the lower end of the spectrum or not supporting education or other things that could help invigorate our society.
Richard Vague:
Well, I mean, when you look historically, there was a point in time and a lot of this was during and immediately after World War Two, Americans were the tallest people in the world, more or less. I mean you take out some of the smaller countries there. But we were the tallest with the longest lifespan. Well-
Rob Johnson:
It’s not there now.
Richard Vague:
… I don’t know if you’ve traveled lately, but neither of those things is as true as it once was. And that would indicate something very fundamental is going the wrong direction in the United States.
Rob Johnson:
And I know people like the Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz whose book, The Price of Inequality turned a lot of heads. But he’s been emphasizing recently how more than half of the American population now has a lower standard of living than they had in 1989. Despite all the progress and the productivity that you’ve seen. And one of the things I noticed, that’s quite vivid was the acceleration of the size of the wealth of your top ranked wealthiest people in each chapter, it looks hyperbolic from, say 1970 to the present.
Richard Vague:
It’s extraordinary. I mean, when I was a young man, Ross Perot, I think was the wealthiest person in the United States at two billion. I’m not even sure he’d make the list anymore. And the other thing that goes along with that is the size of mergers and acquisition transaction. They were very rare and then we had a couple. We had a burst of M&A in circa 1900, and we had our second burst of M&A circa late 1920s. Well, now we have just an almost perpetual recombination of businesses. And deals that aren’t 50 or $100 billion in size barely get mentioned in The Wall Street Journal. I think that speaks to this growing inequality and this bifurcation that’s going on in the country.
Rob Johnson:
And it also speaks to the political economy, where size creates power vis-à-vis the government. And I mean, we’ve seen this, you and I have talked in the past about the too big to fail banks. I see a lot of CEOs at too big to fail banks become budget hawks because they want contingent fiscal capacity to be preserved for their next bailout. They don’t want to have a next bailout. But they want the world to know they’re not going bankrupt. So their request to funding comes down and their market share increases relative to small institutions. And so you have all kinds of interactions between politics and economics, but being big matters.
Richard Vague:
Well, I mean-
Rob Johnson:
you don’t have leverage.
Richard Vague:
… it really is becoming very much like the later years of the Gilded Age when companies were so big and politicians were effectively employees of some of these companies. Maybe we’re not to that point yet in this year. But I mean, politicians really spend 80 or 90% of their time fundraising and maybe 10 or 20% listening to real constituents and solving. I’m oversimplifying but it’s-
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, not much.
Richard Vague:
… astonishing. It’s astonishing how much the role fundraising plays.
Rob Johnson:
I have a friend who I won’t name, who used to be a United States senator. And I said to him, the thing that shocked me when I was in my 20s and working on Capitol Hill was how much alcoholism was a ghost in the Senate. And he said, “Yeah. When you spend 70 to 80% of your time fundraising and much of the fundraising is to do things for people that’s detrimental to your constituents, the emotional pain and dilemmas that you experience lead you towards drinking.” He said-
Richard Vague:
That’s interesting.
Rob Johnson:
… “It shouldn’t surprise you at all.”
Richard Vague:
That’s very interesting.
Rob Johnson:
And I know a number of people have left the senate because they didn’t feel like what you might call a deeper sense of purpose could be achieved given the incentive structures that survival requires.
Richard Vague:
It doesn’t look like a job anymore.
Rob Johnson:
No. No. And that’s troubling to me, particularly as what you might call the sophistication, technological sophistication of the economy increases. Because you need what you might call sophisticated guidance and control. And if the most talented people say, “That’s not for me,” how can government play the leadership role that you’ve envisioned or shown us from other periods in your book but in vision-
Richard Vague:
That we need.
Rob Johnson:
… as necessary to the future?
Richard Vague:
Yep.
Rob Johnson:
I guess the, how would I say? There’s often a discussion about how the founding documents in the United States, Constitution, Bill of Rights, etc. are no longer germane. Meaning they were principles around simply an agrarian economy. And now we have a very different structure. Lots of people are very concerned about what you might call the checks and balances across the three major, the courts, the legislature and the executive branch, because they say it’s much easier to block than it is to pass. And so all kinds of entrenched interests can get in the way of the evolution and the progress we need. Do you think we need another constitutional convention to create a set of principles that maps onto the structure which is so different than when the country began?
Richard Vague:
Well, it’s interesting. One of the people I admire the most is Mike Tomasky, who is the editor of both The New Republican and Democracy. And Democracy just put out an edition with a new constitution. So if you’re… It is fascinating, and if you’re interested in that, you should check that out.
But when I go back to the Constitution, I think the Constitution was designed to obstruct. I’m a fan of the Constitution, I won’t criticize the Constitution, but you had the United States had gained independence and had not yet brought the Constitution. There was an extended period, from 1776 to 1787, where we operated as a confederation. And the important documents of that era were the state constitutions. And the most radical of those state constitutions was in Pennsylvania. It created the assembly, there wasn’t a governor, I think it was a 15 person committee taking the role as the executive. There were not two houses of Congress, there was only one. It was unicameral. And that was to make sure that it was responsive to the needs of the people. So it was a much more, shall I use the word democratic document. And the wealthy folks at that time, many of which I have learned a lot about, admire, really set about to block that kind of thing. They replaced Pennsylvania’s constitution with one that had two houses and a single governor. And in that mechanism, it was much easier to block legislation.
And so by the time 1787 came around, they knew how to design a document that gave some democracy in terms of the election of House of Representatives. But senators, as you know were elected by state legislators. And the President was elected by an electoral college. There was very much the intention to construct a document that didn’t let things get out of hand. That caused change to occur slowly rather than rapidly.
And so I think that’s what we still have today. It was designed to make things easy to block. And it’s still easy to block things. And so I think the more fundamental question is, do we want a system where it’s less easy to block something? And if the answer to that question is yes, we probably do need to make some very fundamental changes.
Rob Johnson:
I’m reminded, I was recently involved in a seminar related to moral and ethical design, and my role was to contribute the perspective of Adam Smith. And Adam Smith was a fascinating man because he didn’t really espouse principles. He described in The Theory of Moral Sentiments how people come to believe what they do.
Richard Vague:
Right.
Rob Johnson:
Through watching someone suffer and saying, “That could happen to me.” Or seeing someone thrive and saying, “That’s virtuous.” And so that, which might call your values are a learning by doing.
Richard Vague:
Yep.
Rob Johnson:
But then he said, now we should get forward to The Wealth of Nations, “When you look at a system and it’s not acting right you don’t want to, what you might call, repair it with a lightning bolt, you want it to evolve. You want it to evolve in a continuous way that inspires trust. You want it to evolve towards what you might call the ethical asymptotes or vision that’s evolving in this society. But the human society can lurch backward out of fear of the unfamiliar-
Richard Vague:
Without question.
Rob Johnson:
… and create a whole lot of harm.” And this was fascinating because he had spent some time in France, just around the time of the French Revolution. And he loved the culture of France and the arts and how these emotional values evolved. But was a little bit terrified by the intensity that the French Revolution brought to the streets.
Richard Vague:
Without a question. Without a question.
Rob Johnson:
And so I’ve never, until preparing for that talk had so much, we might call it deep regard for Adam Smith’s wisdom. And fascinating, so when you read The Wealth of Nations, and I read a beautiful book by James Buchan called The Authentic Adam Smith, you find out that he’s been used by what you might call free market libertarianism in great contradiction to what he actually was saying.
Richard Vague:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Rob Johnson:
So I think, which I guess what I come back to then is grounding our perceptions in history that’s thorough and deep, not selective interpretation of the evidence helps us to evolve a vision of what is good. Or what is the right trajectory given the challenges of today. And I think your book plays a very, very strong and constructive role. And it’s fun. I expect people to want to read the next chapter after. I know how it caught me like a magnetic field. And where did you get the notion to do these portraits of people? These rankings, the storytelling and the pictures and things? Where did that vision come from? Not a lot of books are written like this.
Richard Vague:
Well, the book actually almost evolved in the opposite way than a book normally would be. I originally conceived of it as a book of lists that wouldn’t have narrative. And so we have the list that you’ve been kind enough to point out, the wealthiest Americans or the largest banks, the largest businesses, the most important inventions. So we had all these lists that we were pulling together for every year, many of which took a lot of homework. And then we said, “Well, we can’t just have lists. Why don’t we have been yets of some of the important personalities of that age?”
So the second stage was to come… And by the way, the heroes in the Ice Age were very diverse, throughout history. And I think that’s one of the unexpected things. We find African-American entrepreneurs going far, far back. We find important and successful women far, far back in America’s history. And so it was fun and important we felt, to tell some of those stories. And so by the time we laid all that out, then we said, “Well, hell, we might as well go out and write the history too.”
Rob Johnson:
That’s interesting. I did notice that what you might call excavation of the diversity of success. And I think that’s very nourishing for meeting the present challenges.
Richard Vague:
Lots of brilliant, creative folks from all walks of life.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Well, I knew that from my work in music and arts, but in many, many aspects of business I remember… What was the woman’s name that worked with Disney World for a while and then went into garment and other things? Sylvie, what’s her name? I just enjoyed all of these, what I’ll call the good news about people and their capability. And I think-
Richard Vague:
Yeah, a lot of great women. And up to to today we have CEO of Spanx is profiled there. Oprah Winfrey is.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah.
Richard Vague:
There’s-
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, the CEO of Spanx is the lady I was referring to. She had worked at Disney World for a while as play build I believe, but-
Richard Vague:
Became a billionaire.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. And the gentleman, whose last name Johnson, African-American in Chicago, John Johnson, I believe.
Richard Vague:
Absolutely. Built a media empire. It’s very impressive people.
Rob Johnson:
That’s, how do I say? You brought a lot of good news to the table.
Richard Vague:
Well, thank you, thank you.
Rob Johnson:
In a dark time, and I’m not surprised, knowing you. But I am grateful that this book has, how do I say? Enlivened our sense of hope and of possibility.
Richard Vague:
Well, you’re very kind to say that.
Rob Johnson:
Any final thoughts? So I always ask. What’s your vision of your next book?
Richard Vague:
Well, I actually have several books in the works. One of them is going to be… The great publishing house, Polity Press, out of Cambridge, England approached me to write a book on debt Jubilee, which will come out before the end of the year. We’re working on two books beyond that. One of them is just going to be an overall treatise of debt, just to really explicate the entire subject in a comprehensive way that has not been done previously. And I’m very excited about that. And then another one, the other one we’re working on, and maybe I’ll quit after this one, is a biography of Thomas Willett, who I think was the most important financial executive in the United States. He was the across the street neighbor of Alexander Hamilton. He was the president of the First Bank of the United States, president of the very first chartered bank in the United States which was called the Bank of North America, and just this dynamic presence at the inception of the US financial system. And we’re trying to put a biography together of him.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Excellent. Well, I do hope you’ll agree to come back and share with this podcast each of those works as they unfold. And I think, how would I say? I’d encourage people to look at your earlier books that brief… Was Brief History of Doom, was absolutely fantastic and this new book, as I’ve been honoring throughout this last 40 minutes, brought a great deal of joy and a big smile to me. So thank you for your work Richard. Thank you for your service on the board of INET. And thank you for your concern about our society at this critical juncture.
Richard Vague:
Well, it’s an honor to be with you. Thank you.
Rob Johnson:
It’s an honor to be with you too. We’ll, how do you say? Let me know as soon as the next one’s on the launch pad and we’ll be back for another session.
Richard Vague:
Thank you.
Rob Johnson:
Thanks. Bye-bye. And check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at ineteconomics.org.
