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Works in Progress is an online magazine devoted to new and underrated ideas about economic growth, scientific progress, and technology. Subscribe to listen to the Works in Progress podcast, plus Hard Drugs by Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethen.
Ben Southwood: The mainstream
media is lying to you.
Sobering study shows
challenges of egg freezing.
That's the New York Times, The
failed promise of egg freezing.
That's what Fox calls it.
Success rates for frozen eggs vary
widely but rarely go above 30%.
That's what the Financial Times says.
Even that rare doubt of
truth in uncertain times.
Glamour Magazine says the odds
are stacked heavily against you.
This is all extremely misleading.
It's true that women in their forties who
freeze their eggs, which is most women
who freeze their eggs, have relatively
low success rates, but that's because
they have relatively low fertility.
If women freeze their eggs in their
twenties, then when they unfreeze
those eggs and use them, they have
the fertility of their twenties.
Eggs age, but uteruses don't as much.
The oldest woman to ever give birth
was 72, but she did it with donor eggs.
Where did I learn these facts?
Issue 23 of Works in Progress.
So I've brought my colleagues, Aria
Schrecker, Peter Garicano, I'm Ben
Southwood, to discuss the latest
issue of Works in Progress, issue 23.
Pieter Garicano: Ben, I don't even
think that's the most interesting
fact in that whole article.
The much more interesting story the
article tells you is that you've
been lied to about fertility curves.
People often think that your
probability of giving birth or your
fertility, declines very gradually
between ages 18 and 35 and then very
steeply as women enter middle age.
This is the story you hear in
school, this is the kind of graph
you see, this is the kind of general
wisdom that people will accept.
The problem is this is totally not true.
It's based on the fact in the past we
couldn't observe actual fertility, which
is like your probability that you'll give
birth if you're having unprotect sex.
We could just observe how many
people were having children.
So we have these big data
sets of German peasants.
We have the datasets of Iranian farmers.
It turns out the fertility curve
correctly measured, including just
non-pregnant women, is totally linear.
It declines just as much between 18
and 25 as it does between 25 and 30.
And importantly, this means that actually
it's quite a bit higher as you get
older than what is commonly assumed
when you look at the concave line.
Ben Southwood: Key thing is this
isn't looking at someone's fertility
throughout their life, in which case
it would catch all of the children
they had had previously to the study
or after the study because they were
pregnant or they'd recently given birth.
Instead, it's just looking,
did you have a child this year?
And one of the main reasons you
wouldn't have a child this year is
because you had a child last year, or
you're going to have a child next year.
And those people are not counted in.
Pieter Garicano: If you actually plot
monthly birth rates in non-pregnant
women, it's an extremely steep,
basically linear curve between 18 and 40.
It doesn't go slowly and fast.
It's every single year that
you wait, it becomes harder
and harder to come pregnant.
Ben Southwood: But there is
no steep decline after age 35.
It's flat.
There's no particular year where
fertility drops off a cliff.
It's just a steady decline
throughout a woman's life.
Aria Schrecker: So I guess fertility
aging is much more like regular aging
than it's like say, going through puberty.
Pieter Garicano: Exactly.
And of course the key point is the
thing that's aging is not the ovary or
the uterus, it's the eggs themselves.
Women start their lives roughly
with 2 million, 2 to 6 million
primordial follicles, of which
roughly 400 will be menstruated.
But the vast majority of them
will just die off throughout a
woman's life at a very linear rate.
Which means that when you're doing,
for example, egg harvesting to freeze
them, it becomes increasingly hard.
Now Aria, I think you may
know something about this.
Aria Schrecker: I may have
some relevant information.
Ben Southwood: Is there anyone
here with any experience of this?
Aria Schrecker: Yep.
So I'm currently about to lay
about 44 eggs on Saturday.
I'm going through the process
of egg freezing currently.
Top line review is it's
not as bad as people say.
I think some of this is like
some kind of meta where, I guess-
Ben Southwood: What do people say?
Aria Schrecker: What do people say?
People say it's very painful, that you get
very bad mood swings that it's very rough
on your body, that it probably won't work.
There are loads and loads of things
that you generally hear when people are
weighing up whether or not to do it.
They say it's expensive, it's kind of
expensive, but for what you're buying,
which I think is insurance of getting to
have children in the next 10 years or so.
Especially like what I'm thinking is being
able to have children maybe when I'm 40,
which I might not be able to otherwise.
It seems like it's actually
quite a cheap thing to buy.
Ben Southwood: Ruxandra and Luzia,
the authors say that Spain is the-
if you have, someone like me, one
day may decide I need to go to
Turkey, as they say in UK discourse.
I may decide that my follicle-
a different kind of follicles.
My follicles are becoming not dense
enough and I need to go to Turkey.
I gather that the world capital of
fertility for that purpose is Spain.
Are you going to Spain?
Aria Schrecker: I'm not going to Spain.
I'm going to a lovely place
somewhere else in London, basically.
Pieter Garicano: I don't think they
say the world capital is Spain.
I think they say Spain is very cheap
and also generally a nice place to be.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
Pieter Garicano: And so if you're
going to be there anyways, you
might as well take a day off.
Ben Southwood: Maybe-
Pieter Garicano: Or a few days off.
Ben Southwood: But I think that it has
that, that's the starting point for
a flood of international egg tourists
turning up and getting their eggs frozen.
Aria Schrecker: I'm not against it.
I have specific reasons for- I
mean, for one, I live in London.
It's much more convenient
to do it in London.
The price differential doesn't
seem to be that extreme.
My husband would also need to
come to the place that we extract
them so the costs compound because
we're not just doing egg freezing.
Pieter Garicano: How much is it?
How expensive is this?
Aria Schrecker: I've got
a complicated package.
Ben Southwood: Why don't you say how
much is what's a typical price to pay?
Aria Schrecker: A typical price would
be about £5,000 in Britain and then
£200 per year for keeping them frozen.
Ben Southwood: So I remember being quite
interested in the piece about how the
eggs winnow down from the starting point.
Is that something you've experienced?
Like they've gone in and found your
primordial follicles and there were antral
follicles- Can you explain a little bit?
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
So you start off where they, before
you even start any hormones, they
just want to make sure it's actually
going to work if they do it.
So they'll give you a ultrasound and
they'll see, they'll look your ovaries
to make sure they look healthy and they
can roughly get a ballpark number of how
many available follicles you have that
plausibly would develop into mature eggs.
So for that, I mean they just,
they literally just do a count.
You can see them, you can see it
on the screen and they you can see
like the little black holes that
this ultrasound doesn't go through.
I don't really what the typical
numbers of something like this were.
I had high twenties in both ovaries, and
then once you start the injections, most
of those do actually start to mature.
And so which when I say I'm
going to lay about 44 eggs,
that's what I'm talking about.
There are 44 mature follicles.
Now, after that point, you should expect
a winnowing at each potential stage.
So once they take the eggs out of the
follicles, only about four fifths of them
I think will end up being mature eggs.
And after that point, only a certain
number of those are actually going
to be successfully fertilized.
After that, only a certain number
of the successful fertilizations are
going to actually develop and grow.
And after that, only a small proportion
of those are going to end up being- not
having any chromosomal abnormalities.
And then when it comes to implantation,
you lose a bunch in implantation as well.
So the sort of 44 number you should
expect probably, I think the typical
attrition rate, you should expect that to
be something like five or six children.
Ben Southwood: I think the message
of this piece basically is that egg
freezing and embryo freezing are both
much more effective than many people
have been led to believe- If big, if
women freeze their eggs early and they
say that they think, well, they're both
freezing their eggs and they say that if
you have a partner that you know you're
going to have children with soon, fine.
If you don't.
The insurance cost is quite low for the
benefit you get, which is guaranteeing,
pretty much guaranteeing you'll be able
to have the number of children you want.
which I think is a
pretty impressive thing.
Aria Schrecker: One other thing you
really get a sense of when you're
talking to the doctors and nurses is
all of them are, man, I wish all of
our patients came to me at your age.
I wish we were working with
people in their twenties.
Part of the reason they say that I'm
saying the symptoms aren't that bad.
They're saying part of the reason the
symptoms aren't that bad is because
you're quite young, we don't have
to pump you with as many hormones.
This is actually just much easier.
And it seems like every- obviously
everyone who works in that industry,
to some extent, they're trying
to sell their goods, but you can
tell that they're actually very
enthusiastic and in favor of more
people doing this while they're young.
Pieter Garicano: I think they
say in the piece, the average age
someone currently does this in the
United States is like 37 or 38.
It's extremely late to be going
through a procedure like this one.
Aria Schrecker: I think it's very sad
that when tech companies and like lots
of private insurance schemes offer egg
freezing, people often view it quite
cynically, I think as the company
trying to basically buy their workers
extra time and like trying to hope
that they're encouraging them to delay
making family formation decisions.
I think it's very rare that that
would be persuasive to people or
that companies are thinking in that
sort of homo economicus kind of way.
I think there are lots of people who
have this perk available to them as
a side thing from their job that they
never think, think about that it would
actually be basically free for people
in probably like 20% of young employees.
I actually have a plus one to
this whole thing, which is I've
decided not to sell my eggs.
Actually, I think this is also
an interesting reason because
you can't sell eggs in Britain.
That's fine.
I can travel abroad and I
can take my eggs with me.
But the main market for
egg selling is America.
And because I was born in 1996 in Britain,
we had mad cow disease and you cannot
donate any blood or organs or anything
in the United States if you lived in
Britain for more than six months, from
a period that ends at the end of 1996.
So technically, I'm eligible
to sell my eggs in America
because I was born in August.
I did not live in Britain for six months.
I wasn't around for six months in 1996,
but I get screened out by all of the
donor websites like pretty quickly.
And so I would have to come up
with a bespoke brokerage agreement.
And that seems like a lot of work.
But if you tick like a bunch of boxes,
a whole bunch of them basically being
like you a normal weight, are you,
did you go to a good university?
Especially actually if you're South
Asian, because Indian people love having
children and they hate donating eggs.
You can actually make a lot of
money from selling your eggs.
So if you are worried about
being able to afford it-
Pieter Garicano: Tell us a price tag.
How much?
Aria Schrecker: About 30 to 50 grand.
Pieter Garicano: Per egg?
Aria Schrecker: Per cycle.
Pieter Garicano: Wow.
Ben Southwood: They go all
22 or all 44 or something?
Aria Schrecker: Well, so this is it.
You can come up with a bespoke
arrangement, so if you want to
freeze them, then you can also
plausibly come up with a freeze and
share agreement with a couple that
would like a couple of your eggs.
Ben Southwood: So basically, I think
egg freezing is really awesome and it's
great that we have this technology.
There is one niggle at the back of
my mind that when I'm reading this
and thinking about this technology,
which is that, so I have two children,
a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old.
And having small children is really
hard work and not just, oh, it takes
a lot of your time and it's, you want
to go out drinking or see your friends
or like go traveling and you can't
because you have children, whatever.
Not that, that's not such a big
deal, but children are just high
energy and require you to do a
lot of physical labor around them.
They involve a huge
amount of physical labor.
My son was banging at the door
this morning as he does basically
every day saying 'Outside,
outside!', and he's 16 months old.
He wants to go outside and run around
pitch black at 6:00 AM I think that
for that reason and for another reason,
which is that one of the best things
about having children is that you get
to spend time on the earth with them.
And once you have them, you think,
damn, I wish they'd been around longer
because I really, really like my
children and you think they're going
to have children one day, I hope.
And I would like to be
around with those children.
I never knew any of my great
great-grandparents, any of
my great-grandparents, not
great-great-grandparents.
but my wife knew basically all
of hers quite well when she
was not just a tiny child, but.
Like 10 or whatever.
I would like that for my children.
I would like that.
I would like that for me, to
meet that far down the line.
And so I worry about people deciding
to have children as their first choice
in their forties, for example, because
the time you get on the world with
your children and your grandchildren
is very constrained and it's just
everything is just much harder.
Now I'm not saying that I don't think we
should have the option to freeze their
eggs and make that choice for themselves
because there are loads of trade offs
in the world, and I'm sure people are
better at making their own trade offs.
But I would like people to know
that if you are having children
and you're 45, if that was the
only way you could get there, fine.
You'll be really, really glad.
But if it's not the only way that you
could get there, you'll probably think.
God damn.
I wish they had, I had the
body I had when I was 30.
Like I when I was 25, I
barely got hangovers at all.
Now I often have to go to bed when, with
my child, keeping me up all night and it's
like, I can't take this and I'm only 35.
Pieter Garicano: See, I have a much
less ambitious hope with this article.
There's just about correcting
some pretty big misconceptions.
In this case, you're being told it
doesn't really matter if it's 25 or 35.
It really does matter, and the
fertility curve has a different shape,
and just having that information in
your mind I think will allow people
to make more informed decisions.
But correcting big misconceptions is
a broader theme in this issue because
the article immediately after the egg
freezing article is about how Australia
stopped the boats by Amelia Wood.
Now, you may have heard of things
like the Rwanda deal in Britain or
Netherlands has the Uganda deal.
Italy has the Albania deal.
The idea behind all these deals, is
that if you have Illegal immigrants,
or asylum seekers which come to you by
boat or by land, and they arrive in your
country to process their asylum requests.
You can process their requests offshore
and in the case they are rejected,
they're no longer in your country.
Many countries around Europe and indeed
around the world are really keen to try
out this model of offshore processing.
And why are they all doing
this at the same time?
Well, because there's one country
in the world, which I think had a
asylum problem, or at least had a
populist that was very keen to reduce
the amount of illegal immigration.
And they solved it by doing
offshore processing; Australia.
And in this article by Amelia Wood, I
think Amelia pretty definitively proves
that in fact, offshore processing is
totally not what Australia did, and
is totally not necessary at all if you
would like to reduce the amount of legal
immigrants arriving in your country.
Ben Southwood: So explain
how she does this?
Pieter Garicano: Well.
Australia-
Ben Southwood: Because I thought that-
I labored under the same misconception.
Aria Schrecker: Well, I remember
you had your doggerland offshore
processing scheme that you wanted to do.
Ben Southwood: Doggerland
offshore processing.
Look, guys there are thousands
of square miles of land that
are only about four meters deep.
You Dutch can't have them.
It's English land.
And we can just raise it
up at a very low cost.
And if you look to what they're
doing in the Maldives, the Maldives
needs land more than anywhere.
And they have a clever way of doing it,
which is we don't have to pay upfront.
We don't have to come up with anything.
Well, you just get 10%
of the land you raise.
So if you raise land,
we tax you on the land.
You give us 90% of the land,
you keep 10% of the land.
That way you don't even
have to plan any of it.
We just say, raise the land
and boom, we've got it.
A deal.
Pieter Garicano: And the best thing
about it is you won't need to use
this land for offshore processing.
Ben Southwood: I'm struggling to
think what else the land could be
useful for except for disrupting
Dutch shipping lanes or something.
Pieter Garicano: Well, lemme
tell you roughly why she proves I
think so effectively why offshore
processing isn't necessary.
So Australia's had like very low rates of
boat migration since like the seventies.
Initially it was people coming
from Vietnam, and then towards the
eighties it really starts picking
up and you start getting people
coming from the Middle East as well.
They often fly to Indonesia, and
in Indonesia they'd pay a smuggler
to bring my boat to Australia.
And in the late nineties the Australian
populists had enough and a liberal,
which is in Australia conservative Prime
Minister decides to put a halt to it.
And so he does two things.
One thing is that he
starts offshore processing.
He takes people who come by boat and
brings them to Christmas Island and to
Nauru, which are territories or islands
near Australia, process them there.
But the other thing they do is turnbacks.
A turnback is that the the Australian
Coast Guard encounters your ship, or the
Navy encounters your ship and then very
gently either tows you back or invites you
on board and brings you back to the beach.
Aria Schrecker: Where
do they tow you back to?
Pieter Garicano: Indonesia.
Aria Schrecker: Gosh.
Ben Southwood: How far is
Indonesia from Australia?
Pieter Garicano: Extremely
close, like 200 miles.
Aria Schrecker: Oh really?
Pieter Garicano: Christmas
Island in particular.
So they were heading for a offshore
Australian territory at Christmas
Island, which is off the coast of Java.
So it's really not far at all.
Aria Schrecker: And was basically
everyone setting off from Indonesia.
Pieter Garicano: Everyone
comes from Indonesia.
Aria Schrecker: So it's not that they
just, here's a boat in our ocean, we're
going to make this Indonesia's problem.
Pieter Garicano: No, no.
It's also because the Australian
navy and Coast Guard were basically
camping outside the Australian EEZ.
They just wait for people to come.
And so it wasn't even like they
were dragging them a hundred miles.
They would drag them 20, 10 miles back.
Aria Schrecker: Which like a
classic Capture the flag strategy.
Pieter Garicano: Capture the flag.
Exactly.
Very simple.
So these both things at once, that
offshore processing was very high profile,
very controversial, and then Turnbacks
were actually done in secret because
this whole process was classified in part
because Indonesians, as you might expect,
Aria, were not very happy about this.
And they complained.
That's the end of the
first wave from Australia.
This doesn't give us any evidence which
of the two things actually works, but
Australia's actually interesting and
the media shows this because they had a
liberal, a left wing prime minister who
came afterwards, who ended both programs.
And as expected between 2012, to
2013, the whole thing happened again.
Huge wave people came from
Indonesia, on the all of 30,000
people tried to move to Australia.
And there they actually
staggered the two approaches.
So first they tried offshore processing,
and then a few months later they started
Operation Sovereign Borders, where they
did a very large scale term expiration.
And if you look at the time
of arrivals, almost no one is
deterred immediately after the
introduction of offshore processing.
It's only once turnbacks are happening
that people stop trying to come.
And the most important and the most
surprising bit of evidence that
she gives in this whole article is
that since 2014 Australia hasn't
done any offshore processing.
They just stopped.
They secretly wound it down.
And since 2014, they've only done
turnbacks and nonetheless they've
had zero arrivals over overseas.
Aria Schrecker: Why doesn't
offshore processing work?
Pieter Garicano: It might work,
but it's extremely expensive.
Even Australia had to spend
billions and billions of dollars
on their programs in Nauru.
Ben Southwood: And it gets full.
Pieter Garicano: And it gets full.
That's the main thing.
It's so expensive that you only have
capacity of 1000 to 2000 people.
And so almost everyone that was taken
off offshore was actually, eventually
was released into Australia because when
too many people came at once they got-
when too many people came at once, they
decided to clear the camps by bringing
people to Australia to post them there.
And so offshore processing is like
so hard that it is incredible.
And so it doesn't work as a deterrent.
Aria Schrecker: Right?
It's like just a gateway drug
to onshore processing basically.
Pieter Garicano: You could, I
think you could call it that.
I guess maybe the people who are
being processed see it that way.
They expect that de facto
they will be posted onshore.
Aria Schrecker: Also I guess depending
on the situation you're fleeing maybe
just being offshore processed is
better than what you've left behind.
So you kind of don't mind
languishing in those camps.
Pieter Garicano: The
camps seemed pretty bad.
I think actually part of the story here
is that a mix of circumstances, the
fact the camps were so bad that like
the NGOs made a very big deal of it and
the press made a big deal of it, and
the fact that Indonesia hated Turnbacks.
And so the Australian government kept it
secret, meant that almost everyone who
studied the Australian migration story
only hears about the offshore processing.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
Pieter Garicano: Because
it's so gruesome and evil,
Aria Schrecker: And sensationalist.
Pieter Garicano: It's genuinely a
very fraught unpleasant place to be.
Like these, these camps in Nauru
were very, by all accounts, very
unhappy and depressing places.
So people being entirely distracted,
this other approach where it turns
out that you don't need to do any of
that and just extremely predictable,
very consistent, very light touch
enforcement is more than enough.
Aria Schrecker: So do we think
anywhere else is going to do Turnbacks?
Could we, could Britain do turnbacks?
Should we turn people- because we'd
be turning people back to France.
Pieter Garicano: So the problem is
that Turnbacks currently are seen
as illegal on the ECHR because
it's collective punishment.
You're meant almost, you meant
to always treat everyone as
individual and a turnback-
Aria Schrecker: Wait, why
is it collective punishment?
Pieter Garicano: Because they
don't ask who you are, they just
see the boat and bring it back.
Ben Southwood: But that's inconsistent
with, firstly, that's inconsistent
with the Turkey deal where they - where
the Turkey deal was a deal where they
accepted - So after Libya fell, you get
the migration crisis coming to Europe
from North Africa and the Middle East.
And in 2016, if I remember correctly,
they signed a deal with Turkey, which
said, we're going to turnback every
migrant and you're going to take them.
You can turnback every migrant over
the border, you're going to take them,
but we'll take someone else from you.
So they're not treating
them as individual.
They're saying that migrants are an
undifferentiated mass and we are accepting
people, different people from the
people who walked over the border, we're
turning about the ones who come over the
border and we're giving asylum to the
same number of people, but just without
an incentive to come over the border.
And that seemed to have
worked in that case.
But is that not inconsistent with ECHR?
Pieter Garicano: Officially?
Officially, the Greeks
say they do no pushbacks.
I imagine they frame it as-
Ben Southwood: But if they've got
a deal with Turkey, which up until
2021 I think was the same thing.
I think it broke down.
But the fact that they agree, and we,
by the way, the UK just signed a deal
with France to do at a very small scale,
the same thing, which is send back one
guy, you can send us a different guy.
So surely is the UK deal against the ECHR?
Pieter Garicano: No, apparently not.
At least so far.
Ben Southwood: So so you think that it's
just not true that turnbacks are against?
Pieter Garicano: Well, so far there've
been cases brought against the
Greek Coast Guard, which have lost
repeatedly because the most, the most
famous cases are- actually the only
cases where European Navy is doing
turnback on boats is in the, a agency.
And the Greek navy there has lost a
bunch of cases and currently officially
denies that it does push backs, even
though the evidence implies they
are actually doing that as a policy.
Aria Schrecker: Seems like it would be
in a lot of European countries' interests
because obviously, I guess everyone's
kind of slightly defending their borders
against each other, probably to focus
a lot more Navy effort over there.
Pieter Garicano: Yeah, and also it
seems much more- It's both cheaper than
doing a Rwanda deal or an Albania deal.
And also it seems much more humane.
Aria Schrecker: I think what's very
appealing about this framework is it
appeals to my sense of what I would
call decision theory about how you
should devise rules for your country.
So I think a lot of people
like to think of policy.
I think immigration policy and refugee
policy is a very classic version of this,
where they see the problem that they
have on hand at the moment they have it.
So they see that they've got these people,
a lot of them are very sympathetic people
and you decide, okay, what do we do?
How many of these people
do we want to take?
Whereas I think you should actually be
thinking, what rules do we want to set
earlier so that we have the best way of
making these decisions in the future?
And I think turnbacks are appealing
because obviously if you're picking
your refugees that you want to take
from the whole world of refugees, you're
not going to simply choose the people
who happen to end up on your shores.
There are loads of much more
appealing things you can do.
Like I think the Hong Kong refugee
scheme is a perfect example of this.
But your press and your general
political establishment cannot be
relied upon to allow you to make those
decisions when you actually, when you're
actually pressed with the problem.
So I think it is nice that you can
kind of take that option away from
them and give yourself the ability to
make those rules by doing the turnbacks
instead of the on processing where you
are already stuck with those people.
Ben Southwood: Kind of like
you're tying your own hands to
make yourself more trustworthy.
Aria Schrecker: Mm-hmm.
Ben Southwood: So the public has, its
public is a principle, has its agent.
The government, government is not
completely reliable on delivering
what the public wants at all times.
One thing the public wants
is we want these refugees,
we don't want these refugees.
Right?
I think there are many publics who
are very sympathetic towards Hong Kong
and Ukraine, war refugees, and then
there are other cases of people they
think are- if you see like a protest,
people are like, they're all male.
If they were, if they were refugees
from a war, they would not all be male.
And that might not be true
actually, because who can
get there, blah, blah, blah.
But but that people say stuff like
that, they're worried that people
are taking advantage, et cetera.
What you are suggesting, which I kind
of like, is that you can get, you can
only get the trust that allows you to
have the other refugees if you bind
yourself in the case of some refugees.
But by having, and my understanding is
that Australia has quite a generous and
well respected asylum system relative
to most European countries, which
are, where most European countries
are voting far right parties or most
European countries are seeing a lot
of distrust in mainstream parties.
One of the causes is distrust
in the immigration system.
But it, see, my understanding is
that that's not true in Australia.
Pieter Garicano: I think this is the most
convincing point in favor of this policy.
Is that indeed where you said Ben,
Australia now has more refugees per
capita than any country in Scandinavia.
In fact, it takes three times as
many people right now than it did
at the very height of the boat wave.
So it turns out by being very predictable
and consistent by building trust
amongst the public, you actually get
a much, much more generous overall
policy than you do in this kind of
uncontrolled principle agent world.
And I think in Australia, in fact
of all the countries pulled by
Ipsos in OECD the Australians were
by far the most positive on asylum.
In fact, 60% of the Australian public
think refugees make a positive economic
contribution to the country, which
is really incredible compared with
Western European countries where
people are university quite skeptical.
Aria Schrecker: This is a white pill.
I would say.
Pieter Garicano: It's a huge white pill.
You can do a thing which is both cheaper,
more humane and allows you to have a
much more generous immigration policy.
Aria Schrecker: Well, yeah, the thing
that really is appealing about it is
that I have always kind of believed
that Anglo countries, I don't know
about the rest of the world, but Anglo
countries aren't actually racist.
And then you see all the new news from
Britain and America and you think, oh
no, what if, what if they actually are?
And it's very satisfying to say,
think that Australia can continue to
have actually quite a high proportion
of people who aren't white, quite
a high proportion of refugees.
Just the sense that they've got their
borders under control is enough to make
them happy with that circumstance again.
Ben Southwood: I do think that ideological
entrepreneurs, including far right racist
ideological entrepreneurs, have an easy
time of it when most mainstream parties
won't tackle issues that the public
has - like that a significant subsection
of the public has a strong opinion on.
I don't think that's an excuse
for people doing nasty stuff or
having nasty opinions, but I think
that it's probably a predictor.
So I'm going to try and do a smooth
transition just like Peter did,
because I think there actually is
a very nice, smooth transition.
We were just talking about the principal
agent problem between the public and
its representatives, and did you know
that in 1965 Britain had almost more
reactors - nuclear reactors than all
the rest of the world put together?
You probably did know that.
Pieter Garicano: Because you
talk about it every single day.
Ben Southwood: Because I talk about it
every single day and it was not true.
So I originally thought they had more
reactors than all the rest of the world
put together, because a source I saw
that seemed plausible and then another
source backed it up, said that in fact,
Britain had 19, the rest of the world
had 21 put together, so it wasn't far
off, but it wasn't quite true when I said
that originally, all the other times.
Aria Schrecker: Can we slightly
change the bounds of the question
so that two of them don't count?
Ben Southwood: I think
that's probably what was done
-
Pieter Garicano: This is like the
Americas, the Aircraft carriers,
what people say, the Americans
have more aircraft carriers
than the rest of the world.
But-
Ben Southwood: You can also, so here's
one way of really changing the bounds.
So I have said many times, and
this is just because for the
audience I was talking to, it
was good to say that Britain had
the first civil nuclear reactor.
Britain did in fact have the
first full scale civil reactor
delivering power to a grid.
Now if you take away all of those
adjectives, it's not definitely true.
Both the Soviet Union and the US can
claim the first react- like can claim a
certain first reactor that produced power.
It's just a question of where you set full
scale and supplying energy to the grid.
But because it was all in such
a short time period and during
1952 this, everyone was basically
getting there roughly the same time.
So one of our articles is by Alex
Chalmers, who has sadly departed us and
no longer works at Works in Progress.
But while he was here, he did
wonderful things on Nuclear energy.
And in one year his incredible advocacy
was clearly the main reason why
John Fingleton's review of nuclear
regulation was so influential.
And the government said that
they were going to repeal things,
but he tells a very interesting
story of British nuclear power.
So Britain relatively early, even if it's
debatable, who was literally the first,
certainly very early, and then during the
1950s, very quickly build out a massive-
or 20 reactors in 10 years, we plan and
deliver the first one in three years.
So we basically say, we're going to do it,
come up with the design for it completely
construct it, and it's plugged in within
three or three and a half years, maybe
four years, next three and a half years.
And then that continues
happening through the program.
Now, something that's really interesting
about this is that one of the big- one
of the big memes of the moment on how
you should deliver nuclear reactors is
that you should do it in fleets, right?
So one thing people say is that the
countries that do it best today, like
Korea and some of the countries that have
done it best in the past, like France,
have taken the design and then basically
copied and pasted it around the country.
Or similar, something like copied
and pasted it around the country.
In France, they had this rule,
which was, if you find a change
that will be good, great.
We're saving it for the next wave.
we are going to implement it,
but we're not going to delay
things or change things now.
Aria Schrecker: That's also our
rule for editing the podcast.
Ben Southwood: It's also our
rule for editing the podcast.
And I think is a great rule.
Britain didn't do this.
Britain basically had
totally flexible designs.
The Magnox reactor, every Magnox reactor
is totally different; there weird
consortia, consortiums, consortia?
I'm not sure which one we are.
Pieter Garicano: You would
definitely say consortiums.
Aria Schrecker: Consortiums.
We've had this argument literally today.
Ben Southwood: I think that
consortia might still be one that
we, people typically say that way.
Well, I think-
Pieter Garicano: We should take a stand.
Ben Southwood: It'd be more noble to
say consortiums, but I'm, I think that-
Aria Schrecker: Take the Anglish
stand, we're saying consortiums.
Ben Southwood: Well, if we were taking the
Anglish stand, we'd probably say something
extremely strange, like group team
money for- but cutting past all of that.
So Britain builds out a bunch
of reactors really quickly.
They do it with a really flexible design.
They do it very cheaply.
Now by today's standards, these are small,
small modular reactors, although obviously
they're not neither small nor modular.
But in terms of the amount of power they
were generating, these are 80 megawatts
or up to 200 megawatts, I think the
latest, the last wave of Magnox reactors.
But then after 1960s, despite building
out the Magnox reactors pretty cheaply,
and despite doing it quickly, and
despite being a nuclear leader, after
the 1960s everything goes wrong.
And there's a common story of why
this is, and the common story is this.
So when we built the Magnox reactor, it
was a special kind of reactor design that
no one else decided to do at scale; using-
it was Gas-Cooled for example, and the
Advanced Gas-Cooled reactor, which is the
next one, or known as the AGR Advanced
Gas Reactor, was the update of this.
And this was in an era in the late
1960s where Harold Wilson, the Prime
Minister, was saying that the white
heat of technology was going to
change society and Britain was trying
to pursue these big mega projects.
Aria Schrecker: You say that no
one else was using it before.
If we had close to half of all the
nuclear actors in existence, then surely,
I mean, there just weren't that many?
Ben Southwood: No one else- what I
meant to say is no one else ended
up building out anything like-
building out a whole program that
was anything like this design.
So in the world today, about 75%
of reactors are something called
a pressurized water reactor.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
Ben Southwood: Which is the simplest
kind of a reactor you can imagine.
You just have a core chain
reaction going off, heat, some
water that heats some other water.
It's like this, it's the
simplest possible reactor.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
I saw a good meme on the internet that was
like, we've invented a new form of power.
You invented a new form of power.
Or is it just steam again?
Just steam again.
Ben Southwood: Yeah, exactly.
It's the same old thing.
That's very simple.
The magnox is a bit more
complicated than that.
The reason we went for it is that
it generates plutonium, weapons
grade plutonium as a side product
and interesting, interesting sidebar
here; so I heard a rumor that the
Korean nuclear pack program was
designed based on a magnox that we
gave away the design of for free in
the 1975 Atoms for Peace Conference.
So I asked the UK's chief nuclear
regulator if that was the case, and he
was like, yep, they copied the Magnox.
We gave it away.
So new North Korea has it
because of our misguided efforts
at a peaceful olive branch.
But basically we wanted lots
of plutonium at the time.
Now we don't want it.
We've got giant lump don't
know what to do with it.
But at the time we did.
The common story is that when we came
to get a new one, a new design went
for the Advanced Gas-Cooled reactor.
And it was of a piece with us
thinking we should have the
best aircraft in the world.
We should have the advanced passenger
train that you won't have heard of,
but very influential, very very high
tech train that was developed by
British Rail around the same time and
then canceled by Margaret Thatcher.
And we also thought we should have
technically the best reactor design.
So Advanced Gas-Cooled reactors didn't,
they didn't need a pressure vessel, their
view was they didn't need a vessel at all.
It was completely safe automatically,
there was no way it could ever go
wrong, it had built in safety features.
And to be fair, they ran a
bunch of them for a long time
and none, never had a disaster.
So maybe it was true, but there
was no containment vessel.
They, that's how sure of the safety
they were, they, it was going to run
at much higher efficiency because
it was going to run at a much higher
heat because, sorry, much higher
temperature because the gas was cooling,
it could, with, if it was water, you
can't get it past a certain point.
But the gas, you could run it
at a high temperature, maybe
at 600 degrees or something.
And the internal physics, the high
temperature that you run it, the
higher the gap is between the thing
that you are generating the steam and
that, so it means- I can't explain
it very well, but I think this, it's
standard, it's standard physics.
So that was all going to
happen and then it went wrong.
That's the standard story and the
st the standard story is part true,
but Alex takes a different view.
He says that a lot of stuff went wrong at
the same time, it's related to the fact
that they chose a bad reactor design.
But if you look later on, once the
Advanced Gas-Cooled reactors were
privatized and handed professional
managers, they actually ran them pretty
well and they were pretty good designs.
They had some flaws.
They have to be retired more early
than the standard reactor designs,
but it wasn't an utter disaster.
The problems were the public
started getting antsy about
all government projects during
the 1960s and 1970s in the UK.
And this is not just nuclear.
Everything starts going wrong.
Everything started after a certain
point, takes ages to finish, goes
through constant fights with everyone
who's nearby it in a way that just
wouldn't have happened before.
When they were building out the first,
the original nuclear program, the Minister
for Power, by the way, minister for Power,
quite a cool term, Ministry of Power feels
like a better name than the Department
for Energy, net zero and Climate change.
Energy Security, net
zero and Climate Change.
Sorry.
Another thing.
The Minister for Power do an inquiry,
the National Parks have said that this
is going to damage the national park.
Interesting.
I think that the benefit of cheap
electricity outweighs that, okay, done
one week later they can start going.
Obviously that's not the case now, but
all of those things, all of the problems
started kicking in during the 1970s.
So Alex's view is that the technocrats
who ran everything, it was all
great when they made the, when
they made the right decisions.
But once the public started losing
trust in, as the principal losing
trust in its agent, the state to
make these decisions on its behalf,
everything went to pot and it, and perhaps
the technocratic model was backfiring.
Aria Schrecker: And I guess you
would say that in the 1970s we
had a period of high inflation.
And this is why the public lost trust.
Pieter Garicano: He's
not wearing corduroy.
So this is not a position that
he's going to take his podcast.
Ben Southwood: I think it's
a little bit suspicious.
I think it's a little bit suspicious.
Pieter Garicano: Lots of different
Ben Southwood with data points here.
Ben Southwood: But I do think that
the inflation thing is relevant.
I think so.
Pieter Garicano: So I am
skeptical of the inflation story.
You know, '68 happens
before the oil shock.
And also, for example, people don't
know this, the country worst hit by the
oil shock in Europe, the Netherlands,
because Netherlands was most pro-Israel.
And so the Netherlands
embargoed for longest.
In fact, Netherlands embargoed for
so long, the French volunteered
to join the Arab embargo if in
exchange, they got oil from the Arabs.
So Dutch had the worst inflation shock.
Didn't have a big upswing
in social disorder.
But let's disregard the inflation things.
We dedicate a whole
episode to this question.
I'm trying to understand what you
mean by technocrats, or people
losing trust in technocrats.
Is it that the technocrats who were
in charge of nuclear mismanaged,
the programs such that people were
like, this nuclear thing sucks.
Is it that different technocrats who
are responsible for planning screwed
it for everyone else because they
made all products hard to deliver?
Or is this a third thing, which kind
of this general sense of like how
elites want ugly things, they're mad
at- they- social change is not good,
modernity is going the wrong direction.
Therefore I'm generally distrustful
whether they are technocrats in government
or business elites or art elites.
Like which of these three stories,
or maybe a fourth story is actually
the Ben Southwood view for why
things- why people lost trust.
Aria Schrecker: I do think Alex has
some fun little anecdotes which are
sort of very yes ministry if you were
going to make fun of British industrial
policy kind of things that you'd see.
My favorite one is part of the reason they
went for the AGRs instead of the PWRs is
because the Prime Minister at the time
wanted to keep turbine makers in work.
Pieter Garicano: Yeah, so the
technocrats were doing bad things.
Is that the problem, Ben?
That the nuclear engineers
themselves were making bad decisions?
Ben Southwood: Here are my suspicions.
Suspicion one is that the
AGR did cause the problem.
It was actually a big part of the
problem, but not through the mechanism
people say, it's not because it was
really bad, because it turns out that
the AGR was still five times cheaper
than the supposedly good design that
we're implementing now in Hinkley
point C and Sizewell C, which is
basically a pressurized water reactor.
The AGR was supposedly worse than them,
but it was much cheaper in real terms
than those, and they still ran them for
40 years with no accidents or anything,
and they- once they worked out how
to use them, it was completely fine.
So it wasn't that bad of a design.
Now, the thing that it hurts the program
through, was by being perceived as a
really bad design and by having really
bad hiccups for the first 10 years, so it
did have some clear flaws, but the main
reason they hurt the nuclear program is
not because it was so unworkable, because
they actually did make it workable and
they could have kept building them out.
And if we continued the program even
at the cost, we actually did end up
paying, which were inflated by their
standards, but not by our standards.
We'd have saved tens of billions of pounds
in the Ukraine crisis, and on alone,
just on the subsidies that Britain's
paid for energy during that time.
So I don't think the AGR was
fundamentally for, but I do think that
the fact that it messed up initially
punctured faith at the same time as a
lot of other things punctured faith.
Pieter Garicano: What's the pattern there,
that the technocrats were very consumed
by glamorous technological super projects?
Is just kind a cultural fad
that happened to pass over?
Ben Southwood: Think of the general
experience you've had, which is that
if the technical people are in charge,
they always want to do the tech,
like the technically perfect idea.
They don't want to consider
any other considerations.
They're not very good at trade offs
if given complete control, right?
They're extremely useful people
to have around, maybe the most
important, but you don't want them
to be in charge of everything.
If it was a bridge, they'll build
like the coolest possible bridge that
could take the a hundred earthquakes
at the same time or whatever.
But they wouldn't be thinking
what's the cheapest bridge that does
the job well enough or whatever.
And I think that that technocratic motive,
too much control in the hands of the
experts was possibly one of the sources
of loss, lack of trust in the program.
But I also think that your other
point, which is really there was a
general thing that was happening.
And it might have been that nuclear
could have carried, if the laws that
came in, the laws that came in weren't
designed to hamper nuclear power, right?
To make this more general, there are
loads of things that got destroyed
by 1970s reforms where the thing
that was being targeted wasn't really
what ended up getting destroyed.
Right.
So sometimes our view is just, oh,
they brought in, I don't know, US
Clean Water Act type stuff like that.
Maybe that, that one's a good one.
So, but they brought in something,
some NEPA review system, that
means you can't reclaim land.
And we just disagree with them
about whether claiming land was
good and maybe we're right, maybe
we're wrong, but we just disagree.
But there are some other things
where, like with nuclear power here.
A lot of the review systems that
were brought in could have just
been written except energy projects
with the national security element.
Right, that easily have been done.
Right.
And they just didn't,
and that was a mistake.
And there are probably contingent
factors that led to that happening
and then unwinding that is just
really difficult over time because
you build up stakeholders who like
the system as it currently is.
Now why did people lose faith
in their system as a whole?
I think there are a wide range of things
that were happening at the same time.
So people will forget it now, but there
was a lot of worry about immigration in
the 1970s in the UK and I think there
were in lots of other countries as well.
Maybe that's a UK specific factor, but
it's definitely, definitely seems like it
was an important new case specific factor.
I think it is clear that, I'm not saying
even if you don't have an inflation
theory of everything, high inflation
periods tend to be periods with more
social dynamic, people voting for
weirder parties and stuff like that.
And so that was an important factor.
And then I do think that like the elites
of the post-war era had a lot of different
opinions from the public they represented
and they did because of their especially
strong powers that they had at that time,
especially in Anglo countries, in Anglo
countries, they had overwhelming power to
expropriate to take decisions on behalf of
society, to make decisions in like a week.
Like there were loads of administrative
systems that would've stopped the
German government taking decisions
quite so quickly on nuclear power
during the 1940s, fifties and sixties.
Whereas the British government could
decide in like a day, whether it was
starting a nuclear power program.
So I think that these decisions, a lot of
them were taken in ways that the public
decided it didn't like over time, it
gave them a lot of benefit of the doubt.
And then when things came to a head,
they came to a head altogether.
Pieter Garicano: So if I had to combine,
it's a mix of contingent nuclear
specific mistakes plus elites with
a very generally, like the opinions
that out touched the population.
Plus a very, very responsive political
system, plus a very responsive
state, plus high inflation, all
of which combines to ensure-
Ben Southwood: Perfect storm.
Pieter Garicano: -that
British nuclear lose its way.
Aria Schrecker: So these stories
about bad British technocrats
should bring us onto a piece about
good technocrats, good American
technocrats, good Dutch technocrats.
I think we should talk about ASML,
which is another piece by Neil Hacker
in the issue 23 of Works in Progress.
Pieter Garicano: So why do
we care about ASML, Aria?
Aria Schrecker: It's plausibly the most
important company in the world, obviously,
depends what you think about AI.
But I think everyone is very familiar
with, I say everyone, lots of people
are very familiar with TSMC and Nvidia
as being the two big chip companies
that you should buy stock in, that
you should be watching, but both of
those companies are totally reliant
on this other company, further down
in their supply chain called ASML.
What ASML do is they make
what is called an extreme
ultraviolet lithography machine.
So one of the features of chips is that
they cut patterns in very, very small
for, to transmit information across.
They used to cut them with physical tools,
but once you're getting down to the sort
of 10 nanometer, three nanometer sizes,
physical tools start to leave enough
residue that the lines aren't perfect.
So what you have to do is instead is you
have to cut with pure energy, so therefore
light and ASML make the only machines in
the world that are capable of doing this.
Other companies tried to make extreme
ultraviolet lithography machines, but
they've all failed up to this point.
It's an incredibly complicated machine.
I think we call it the world's most
complex machine because of how many
parts there are inside of it to
make this very precise technology.
ASML would not be here without the
American government, probably without
the Belgian government and possibly
without the Dutch one as well.
Pieter Garicano: I don't have a big
Ben Southwood theory for ASML, but
I do think there's a few interesting
lessons that I learned from this piece.
For example, the American government,
so ASML has EV technology, because
the American government gave ASML-
Ben Southwood: EV is
-?
Pieter Garicano: Extreme ultraviolet
technology, because the American
government gave it EV technology in the
1990s, it was being primarily produced
by the national labs, which are,
have government research in America.
There were big cuts to the DOE
to the Department of Energy.
And so they closed this EUV program
and instead they asked the private
industry to come and take care of it.
Intel provided most of the funding, and
they were looking for a manufacturing
partner to actually make the machines.
At the time there was a little
worry about Japanese companies, so
Canon and Nikon, which were the two
primary chip manufacturers, they were
excluded from the competition and
instead the sole contractor were,
were ASML and a Californian company
which soon went bankrupt and was
bought by ASML, which left ASML is the
only participant in this consortium.
Aria Schrecker: I think what's
particularly interesting about that
is it seemed like their initial
instincts were to make it only American
companies and that the whole project
would've failed actually, if they'd
stuck with their gut instinct there.
Pieter Garicano: Well, but in some
ways the product also failed regardless
because when the Americans gave the
technology to, ASML, they required ASML
to make 55% of the components in America,
it was one of these classic like JVs.
the technocrats were very big-
Ben Southwood: JVs?
Pieter Garicano: Joint ventures.
The technocrats were very big brain.
They wanted to have like spillovers
in America and make sure America
still controlled the technology.
But it turns out that once you
hand over all the IP and all the
knowhow to a company like ASML, it's
really hard to enforce the contract
obligation they had to create 55%
of their components in America.
Aria Schrecker: And ASML now basically
have the opposite stance, which is they
guarantee, I think maybe a third of
their supply chain is EU specifically
because they don't want to be distracted.
Pieter Garicano: Correct.
And ASML has huge suppliers in Europe,
they supply a lot from Germany, in Belgium
in particular, they supply in general
most of the components come from Eurasia.
And so the Americans- it's kind of a
timing consistency problem here, where
they invited a foreign firm, set a
set of requirements, and by the time
the transfer happened, there was no
way to enforce rest of the contract.
Aria Schrecker: I think they did
get their primary goal, though.
I think their primary goal was
to have a significant part of the
chip industry outside of East Asia,
because at that point that was a
big geopolitical problem for them.
I think the people who started
the program probably have a strong
preference for this to be happening
in Europe than in East Asia.
And I think they probably
are happy with the results.
Pieter Garicano: Well, just to
be clear, I don't think this
outcome we got is bad at all.
I think the national security fears
they had were very overblown, but
it is notable that even in a case
where you're making a deal with a
company based in a very friendly
country, there is no way of actually
enforcing these contracts oftentimes.
Aria Schrecker: Europe's greatest
industrial strategy from America.
Pieter Garicano: Indeed.
Ben Southwood: So if we do an industrial
strategy, we might find ourselves.
Yes, it succeeds, but
does it succeed here?
Pieter Garicano: Indeed.
And ASML, of course, in many other ways,
a European innovation success story.
and so perhaps a correction to
some of the doom and gloom we hear.
Ben Southwood: Some of the doom and
gloom we hear now, who would be?
Who would be-,
Pieter Garicano: The main purveyor?
Ben Southwood: Who would be
spreading that doom and gloom?
Some of the doom and gloom we hear?
Yeah, I think it would be very satisfying
for the Europe, why Europe doesn't have
a Tesla story of the world, why Europe's
innovation is low, if there were no
successful European innovative companies.
But it would also be very
ridiculous, like you wouldn't
expect that to be actually true.
Pieter Garicano: I also think, by the way,
ASML entirely fits the model I described;
when we say that the labor markets are
the main problem for European innovation,
because the kind of innovation ASML has
done has been extremely incremental.
Ben Southwood: They were actually
given the big jump innovation.
Pieter Garicano: They were given the big
jump, the big bet part they were given,
and the rest of it was the kind of thing
Europeans have always been very good at.
And so Neil describes in his article,
ASML has some of the longest tenures
of any company of its size; their CEO
joined 30 or 40 years ago when he was 29.
Many of their senior engineers
are people who joined during
its founding in the eighties.
And so in many ways, ASML as an example,
very, very gentle, incremental innovation,
the kind of innovation we actually
predict that Europe would be good at.
Ben Southwood: They're the chip
versions of wise old Japanese
knife making craftsman masters.
Pieter Garicano: Or the BMW
engine engineers who are just
kind of gods at their craft.
Aria Schrecker: This kind of why I think
lots of the chip industry is in either
Asia or Europe, it seems like it fits that
business model more because it seems like
we, it was just squeezing out more and
more efficiency out of something that we
basically got down rather than coming up
with something totally new and disruptive.
And it matches my stereotypes about
East Asian and European economies.
Ben Southwood: That makes sense.
But you have to remember that the chip
industry is now fabs and designers, right?
Pieter Garicano: It's mostly just files.
Indeed.
Just software.
Ben Southwood: So the actual, so it's
split perfectly along the lines that
you would expect if the Peter story
of the world is true, they've actually
broken the firms down the middle so
that the Americans can do the radical
design elements, and in fact, Britain
to some extent and the Europeans
can do the incremental innovation.
Pieter Garicano: Another great fact
that I really enjoy in this issue
of Works in Progress is in our
article about buses by Samuel Hughes.
The bus actually is not
very radical technology.
You need basically stable roads.
You need pretty sophisticated
carriages, but you can do it with
horse drawn carriages, which we've
had for the last 5,000 years.
So why it takes so long
for bus to come about?
Well, we invent buses once in the 1660s.
It turns out Pascal famous for
Pascal's wager invents the bus, the
very first bus service in history, and
he has a bus that runs around Paris.
Ben Southwood: Well, sorry,
what makes something a bus?
Pieter Garicano: Something's a bus if
it has a fixed route, which predictable.
It's not point to point.
Ben Southwood: I'm listening.
Pieter Garicano: Okay, so Pascal
invents the bus, but Pascal was
defeated by the great enemy of all
innovation, which is regulation.
The workers of Paris are very angry to
see in the 1660s to see the bourgeois in
their fixed little route coming around
through the streets of Paris, and they
riot and they make the bus illegal.
And then the bus technology is lost
for the next 150 years until 18-
Aria Schrecker: We lose buses because,
because crab bucket mentality?
Pieter Garicano: Because people are
jealous of the bourgeois and their buses.
They're like, no one should have buses.
And the next 150 years, we
don't have buses at all.
And the buses are reinvented
by a different Frenchmen, 1824
who has a bathing house, I
believe in Rennes or in Nantes?
I can't remember where.
It's his bathing house, and he just
has a service where he likes to
bring people to his bathing house.
And then he realizes that people
who know that he has a bathing
house service will get on his
carriage and then get off later.
Without reaching the bathing
house because they know he is
going to pick them up anyways.
And he figures out this is actually
something you can commercialize.
And within six years, the bus
technology spreads from France to
London, to Manchester to Birmingham.
It spreads across the ocean.
Like the moment people figure out you
can just run a carriage in predictable
routes, predictable times, the bus
technology is everywhere, unfortunately
for the inventor of buses, there's a
crash in 1829 and he kills himself.
Aria Schrecker: Bus crash, market crash?
Pieter Garicano: Market crash.
Aria Schrecker: Market crash.
Pieter Garicano: And he shoots himself
very quickly after the bus invention.
Ben Southwood: I thought
it was a bus crash as well.
Aria Schrecker: I wasn't sure.
Pieter Garicano: There's a market
crash and he kills himself.
And the tragedy is that his bus company,
which he invented is actually the
main founding company of the current
Parisian power transport monopoly.
And so the guy who invented buses,
still lives on both the fact that his
buses exist and his company exist, RATP.
Ben Southwood: I have seen that around.
Pieter Garicano: That's the guy.
Aria Schrecker: I think actually this
segues surprisingly well onto Ben's piece.
I have always thought since UberPOOL
and obviously since the great death of
UberPOOL in London, that we are clearly
very, very close to, we don't, not needing
buses exactly, but being able to have
a bus like thing where you can hire it
and it gets a whole bunch of people in
the same vehicle and moves you around.
And it feels like once we have autonomous
vehicles regularly driving on London
roads, that should be a very, very easy
technology to be accessible to everyone.
Pieter Garicano: Will it really?
Will we have autonomous vehicles
driving everywhere on London roads?
Or will we have total gridlock because
I read a piece arguing in fact, in
fact this is almost- we we're doomed to
gridlock unless we do one simple fix.
Aria Schrecker: Unless we impose a very
particular form of tax slash regulation.
Ben Southwood: So I'm not the only
person to have ever said this.
I want to clear that-
Aria Schrecker: Ben Southwood, not
the originator of road pressing.
Ben Southwood: I'm not the originator
of this thought, lots of people have
predicted that autonomous vehicles,
without some sort of change in our
institutions would lead to gridlock,
because you can have an office,
you can have a bed, you can have
a little bar with your friends.
Like all of these things are possible.
They reduce the cost of sitting
in traffic to basically zero.
Once that's zero, then you are completely
indifferent about sitting in traffic.
Now, there might be some people who
still need to get where they're going.
For those people, it's
an enormous problem.
I call this the Ogallala trap, after the
Ogallala aquifer, which is this gigantic
aquifer under the Midwest, which is why
all the way from Texas up to like Montana
is some of the, is part of why it's some
of the most productive farmland in the
world, there is loads of water down there.
In the 1940s, farmers invented these
centrifugal pumps that were cheap.
Everyone could get and could
pump tens of thousands of gallons
of water per week or whatever.
And so it started off as a
totally endless resource, the
water down there in the aquifer.
And now many places have cut a hundred
feet off this apparently endless
resource and they're getting down,
and in decades, in some places it'll
be almost dry and obviously they need
to come up with some way of charging
for it, replenishing it, et cetera.
And there are many cases, the passenger
pigeon, for example, survived until
the telegraph allowed people to
send quick messages about where the
passenger pigeon flocks were going.
And then they drove it
extinct within a few years.
Once they got sonar and all the other
tools that allow- and diesel boats that
could stay out at sea for a long times,
the Atlantic whales all just immediately
died really quickly after that.
Common pool resources will get destroyed
by technology in certain cases.
I think the roads are
going to be just like that.
Now, that's actually not a very
original contribution from me.
This is well known.
The thing that I think is slightly
original from me is that there's
a wide perception that charging
people more to use the roads
is just completely impossible.
I think that's mistaken.
I think that there have been loads
of successful road pricing schemes
introduced around the world.
People often artificially restrict their
range of what paying for the roads counts
as so they say, well, only Singapore
has introduced variable time of use
pricing on all its major expressways, so
therefore only Singapore has road pricing.
Everywhere else just has
a kind of tolling system.
But tolls are also paying for the roads
on the margin, and I think that the
interesting thing is that these schemes
work on two very simple principles;
with a toll road, tolls are very
unpopular if you put them on roads that
people are already driving for free.
If you build a new road and put a
toll on it, people might grumble.
There are always whingers out
there, but people will basically,
well, this is a new thing.
I can choose whether I
want to use it or not.
They consider the roads they already drive
on to be something they can't choose.
Whether they've built their life
around driving on that road.
So this is just a tax on me.
I have no choice about it.
But a new road, new
bridge, new tunnel is fine.
So that's one.
Don't change the rules of the game.
So if you want, you can charge on
new things, but not on old things.
And the second is if you want to charge
for stuff, then giving people stuff in
return makes it much easier to sell.
And so the classic example of
this would be, in most European
countries, fuel duties and road
taxes pay for more than the cost of
building and upkeeping roads, right?
So people are very willing to pay
for, which in most countries it's
been justified as something you pay
in exchange for getting the roads.
And people, drivers have generally
been the people who pushed it into
existence in the beginning because
they wanted more money for roads,
which they wanted to drive on.
So if we were to use both of those
things to think about auto autonomous
vehicles potentially causing massive
gridlock, I think it's pretty obvious
what we would do, which is, let's just
put a tax on autonomous vehicles now.
Probably a surge pricing style
tax, like what you pay in an
Uber when it's in higher demand.
Yes.
The people who already use Waymo's
in the small number of places where
it exists won't like it, could become
much more expensive, but almost
no one uses autonomous vehicles.
But once they become omnipresent,
it'll be built into what
people think of as using it.
And the second thing is, if you really
want to support, if you really want
to build a strong constituency for
this tax surviving and not getting
ground down by inflation or changes,
make it go to something that the
people who pay it want, right?
So if at least 50% of this money is
going towards building new roads,
building tunneling roads, building
bridges, things like that, then if
you put the money raised from this
to something that drivers want, they
might not oppose it as strongly.
Pieter Garicano: And you have some
very notable examples, I think
in your piece, of this happening,
especially in the United States, which
people commonly associate as being
very pro driving and very anti-tax.
I myself live in Washington DC in
Virginia, around the corner from me
is a huge network of expressways,
which are private highways,
which you pay a huge toll for.
They're very expensive.
It costs you $30 or $40 to go from DC
to the airport on the express wave.
It's very, it's really steep.
And the trick is the expressways
are only new roads added afterwards
that built by private companies that
pay down the road with a tolling.
And they're huge, there's
huge support for them.
One of the reason people like
them, there's no police, the
police don't operate on them.
So you can in principle
go as fast as you want.
Ben Southwood: Not sure
that's a very good system.
Pieter Garicano: It's a trust system
and as far as I can tell people abuse
it only slightly, and so my point being
that America's actually very supportive
of tolling and paying for roads.
Ben Southwood: Yeah, I mean, yeah,
like through Florida there are loads
of cases where you add the lanes onto
existing roads, so Lexus lanes they
sometimes call them, but I actually
don't think it's the people who use
them are exclusively well off people.
It's people who need
to get somewhere fast.
And they have them across the US like
there are enormous numbers of these
additional lanes where the lanes are
paid for, the road widening is paid
for by charging for those lanes.
And very often those lanes have varying
prices based on how busy the road is.
Sometimes literally varying
like a market price.
Sometimes there are buckets of
popularity that it can go into and
it's capped off at the top and so it's
still in principle could get congested
at the busiest possible time of day.
But those seem to retain public support.
There are an enormous number of managed
lanes and highways managed in some way.
Just meaning you have rules
to access them, usually paying
for them, but not always.
I always enjoy driving through France.
In Britain, most of our major
roads are built on exactly the
site of our old minor roads.
So the M3 is a many thousand
year old road to the west, right?
The M4, et cetera.
Aria Schrecker: It was an old Roman road.
Ben Southwood: Some of them
are Roman roads, some of the
medieval, but they're all very old.
Like some of them are time
immemorial roads, right?
Whereas in France, by and large,
what they did was left those roads.
You can still drive on them.
They did - many of them became dual
carriageways, became major roads.
But their best roads were built again
by private companies, massive motorways
near but not the same alignments.
So you always have the choice of any
journey can be done on a slower, more
winding, but still basically good road.
But you always have the choice of
upgrading to, and you pay about 10
euros every a hundred kilometers.
So when I drove halfway down France,
I made 70 euros there, 70 euros back.
But I literally would put my car on
cruise control 130 kilometers an hour.
So 82 miles an hour for, I don't
know, two hours at a time, not
have to break once, I would just
smoothly go incredibly fast across
France, which I thought was amazing.
Aria Schrecker: I have another
additional take on one of the pieces,
which is I was deeply curious about
the giant neo trad Hindu temple piece.
Pieter Garicano: There's a piece
about giant neo trad Hindu temple?
Aria Schrecker: I thought it was, it was
a great little line in our air table.
It was like, I'm just very excited
to read it, sat down to read it.
And I was surprised at how colorless
all of the Hindu temples are,
because my family from South India.
And so if I imagine a Hindu temple,
I imagine it blue and pink and green.
It's very, it's gaudy, kind of
quite similar to our classical
statues piece from before.
I imagine this stuff to be painted.
And I was kind of disappointed to see
they're all white, they're all stoned.
They're very ornate.
Sure, they're like neogothic
buildings, but they're not exciting.
Pieter Garicano: Is this a thing
that causes a large sectarian divide?
Is this-
Aria Schrecker: There are lots of
large sectarian divides culturally
between the north and the south, and
I've never heard this one come up.
Pieter Garicano: We all agree, temples
are very pretty and it is genuinely very
cool that the stone is load bearing.
I never knew this.
Like almost every building has
like a- is load-bearing steel.
Ben Southwood: So stone, you mean?
Pieter Garicano: Most every building
being built today is load-bearing steel.
Ben Southwood: Oh, I see.
Pieter Garicano: But the temples are
like the, almost the only buildings being
built in America, in Britain, in Spain,
where the actual load-bearing, bearing
part of the building is the masonry.
Ben Southwood: See, I have the
opposite view, which is that,
so bear with me here.
So the modernistic impulse, which
is similar to the gothic impulse
is to say that authenticity
is extremely important, right?
You should never lie with a building,
and this leads them to the view
that facades in themselves are lies.
And you should never have
ornate, beautiful, ornate or
in any way beautiful facades.
You should be making a building maximally
functional, and it should be truthful
and show you what it actually, so if you-
Aria Schrecker: Air conditioning
units and cladding and-
Ben Southwood: Yes, or in this case, the
important thing is if the building is not
load- if the facade is not load-bearing,
it should not look like it's load-bearing.
So it's obliged to have a curtain wall
style thing, or you can even see that
it's glass like the whole way down.
So it couldn't possibly even hold
itself up, or it'd be difficult for it
to hold itself up And I object to this
very strongly because once you look
into the history of architecture, you
find that almost nothing passes their
standard of authenticity and truth.
Aria Schrecker: In fact, Samuel says this
is a maybe one of the solid trends in
what people find beautiful in buildings,
which is that people like to be able to
see how they think it's load bearing.
Ben Southwood: Yeah.
Aria Schrecker: That seems
to be a source of comfort.
So they don't like it if,
columns are too spindly.
Ben Southwood: Unless they're made out
of steel, because then you can tell
they'd be very strong anyway unless
they appear to be made out of steel.
And so my view is that it's kind
of more noble if a building is not
showing its structure on the outside.
because that's thumbing its
nose at the modernist impulse
thing, which is wrong impulse.
Pieter Garicano: I'm totally with
Aria here where yours need very
elaborate counter signaling about
the snobbish modernness, but
I'm like, thick walls are cool.
And so I see these temples
and they look very massive.
They look very permanent.
Ben Southwood: Yeah.
Pieter Garicano: I don't really
care if it's fake or not fake.
I just think the thick wall looks
cool and I'm glad they're making them.
Ben Southwood: Yeah, It's a, it's a
slightly perverse impulse of mine, but
I have the- I want it to be fake, to
show that fakeness is not in itself bad
and that what we should care about is
what the building looks like, and how
we experience it and how enjoyable it
is to be around, and not some idea of
how true the outside is to the inside
or those kinds of considerations.
Aria Schrecker: I think of all of our
pieces this is probably one of the ones
that I would most recommend be read
on the physical magazine rather than
online, because obviously the whole
point is to look at the temples and see
the descriptions and line it up, and I
think the way that is set on the page
has been a real triumph of our art team.
I'm sure it'll look nice on the website,
but I think this is the piece that is
most enjoyable in this format, I think.
Ben Southwood: That's
all we have time for.
Thank you very much for listening
to the Works in Progress podcast.
If you're not a subscriber, you
can subscribe by going to Works in
Progress.co/print if you are a subscriber,
I hope you're enjoying issue 22.
Thank you.