Russ Roberts on Israel and Life as an Immigrant

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Today is December 23rd, 2021, and today's episode of EconTalk is also being released as an episode of Conversations with Tyler. I'm speaking with Tyler Cowen of George Mason, who blogs at Marginal Revolution, podcasts at Conversations with Tyler. It's his 14th appearance here on the program. He was last here in April of 2021 talking about the pandemic. We're going to do something a little unusual today. We're going to talk about what it's like to be an immigrant, using my move to Israel this year as a way to launch the conversation. As my listeners know, and to let listeners at Conversations with Tyler know, I came to Israel to be president of Shalem College, a small liberal arts college here in Jerusalem. And finally, I want to encourage EconTalk listeners to go to our homepage to vote on your favorite episodes of 2021. Tyler, welcome back to EconTalk.

Russ, thank you very much for having me. I'm so curious about your new ventures. Let me start with a general question. In the mature economies, why aren't there more new universities? Shalem is in its 9th year. And how is starting a new university in Israel different from in the United States?

We have a very strange business model. We lose money on every student and we make it up by volume. We give all our students a stipend that covers their tuition and a good chunk of their living expenses. And as a result, in America, if that were the case, we take no money from the government. It's all private donations. And we're in competition. We like to thank for the best students here in Israel. So they often are on scholarships, so we have to match that, and that's the business model. In America, if you don't take money from the government, you usually get less regulation in turn. That is not the case here. The Council of Higher Education is extremely vigilant in making sure that we keep all of our promises, and they're very detail-oriented. Uh, number of toilets, I think, is regulated here per student. So you can imagine starting a new major, we've got to get their approval. We have to provide the syllabi of all the classes that would be taught in the major. We have to show the faculty that would be teaching in the major, and we have to get a variety of committees to sign off on it. So to create a whole college is a major enterprise. The people who came before me did all that lifting, heavy and light. And, you know, in America, the challenge, of course, is both accreditation and reputation. You're in competition with existing— like any new entrant, you have to compete with the existing competitors. And in case of college, brand name is extremely important in America, obviously. People have emotional ties to colleges. So I think, you know, they're very, very few new colleges that are at the highest level. As you know, of course, University of Austin is aspiring to be one of those startups in America, but it's not an easy task. It's hard to do.

So being a university president, it also has a managerial side. How are you feeling managerial culture as being different in Israel compared to the United States?

Well, I don't have a lot of managerial experience. I kind of took a leap of faith on me there.

You've managed your own career your entire life.

Yeah. Tremendous experience. And that meant managing a very difficult person, actually. So it's actually quite encouraging. In all seriousness, the job I've grown in, you know, in the 6 months I've been on the job and on the ground here, it's been a wonderful experience, adventure. You know, we'll talk about what it's like to live here, but to flex a bunch of muscles that I haven't used much or that I didn't know I had. It's a very multifaceted job. There's managing people, there's curriculum and faculty and student issues. There's fundraising.

Can you be more direct when you're managing in Israel? There's a reputation that Israelis are super direct, they don't mince words. Like, is that true? And how does that influence how you manage people? Do you just tell them what to do? Do they tell you what to do? Or how's it different?

A lot of my management team at the senior level speak English and are Americans. So even though they're Israelis now and they're all citizens of Israel, as I am, they bring a lot of their American baggage with them, even though they've unpacked for sure. In terms of the staff and the students, there is a directness, you know, with the students. It's quite interesting. They come here when they're typically 23, 24 years old to start their college career. Very different than in America. And despite having served in the Army, they are remarkably young in a certain way. They have an energy and an openness that's very refreshing. The bluntness part, I don't sense so much on their end. In terms of the staff, it's not really an issue. At least I haven't experienced it. What I think it causes, though, is a certain hesitation on my part for interaction. I've got the language barrier. For the native Israelis here, I try to speak Hebrew with them to amuse them. They're very kind. And then we typically end up speaking in English if it's anything substantive outside of, "How was your weekend?" They are very blunt and straightforward. I kind of like it. I've gotten used to it.

Now, you're an Adam Smith scholar, and as you know, Smith and many of the other classical economists, they were worried about the decline of martial virtue in a commercial society with division of labor. And now that you've lived in Israel, how does this worry seem to you? More justified? Totally false? Or how do you view it?

It's a deep question. I appreciate the flattery of calling me a Smith scholar. I wrote a book on Smith, which of course makes me an expert, but I'm not really an expert. The martial side, the military side here is utterly fascinating. There's a big conversation going around here about whether Israel should continue with the draft or go to a model closer to the United States of a volunteer army. It's an enormous socializing experience here for the young people to go through that. It's, you know, challenging, difficult. Often physically difficult, and it permeates a lot of life here. In the way that there are certain networks of college, for example, in America, or a private school system, you have a certain natural connection to the graduates. Here in Israel, you know, the unit you were in, the kind of unit you were in, the people that you were in that unit with, I think has a very powerful lifelong effect. It's jarring often to an American who comes here. You know, there are a lot of people walking around with their Uzis, their automatic weapons. First time you see that, it's a little bit scary. Second time, kind of can be okay. It's kind of comforting. But it's a part of life here, along with reserve duty. And we have students here miss the first 3 weeks of class because they had reserve duty or they were on some project. And that's intense. Very alien to most Americans.

Given the rising importance of cyber warfare, it seems for Israel most of all, should Israel still have a draft? Isn't the future of Israeli security drones, cyber defense, cyber attacks, other advanced weapons, it's a tech story rather than a personnel story? Yes? No?

You'd think so. I think that may partly be what's driving having a conversation about a volunteer army. Israel doesn't have the personnel needs that it had for an army that it would have had 20 years ago. There are a lot of units here where people in them can't tell you what they're in because they're, I think, highly classified, highly involved in those kind of cybersecurity issues. I think it's a big issue for the world. It's going to be an incredible thing to see how this changes warfare in general. But it's a key part of Israel's arsenal. Obviously, they've been very successful in using cyberattacks to slow down Iran's nuclear program, for example. At least that's the received wisdom.

But will the Israeli military plus conscription still over time produce that sense of social solidarity if the military personnel themselves are not in the long run responsible for national security? Won't it become a kind of Straussian façade and at some point fade away or be viewed cynically or not serve its original socially unifying function?

I don't know. I think there's a lot of cohesion here that we're not seeing. You know, it's a very fractious political environment here, as you know, a lot of political parties, parliamentary system, no constitution, a lot of yelling in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. But despite all that, because of, I think, the external threat, there's a lot of cohesion here, whether there's an army or not. The other part of the army that I think is fascinating is the age of the people in leadership positions, you know, very early in their career. There are people in their mid-20s, early 20s who have the lives of, you know, 100 or more people in their hand as they're in their units. And it creates a different kind of mentality here. I can't say I've sensed it personally. That's my impression. I don't know what will happen. It's a fascinating question. What will happen to Israeli social life if the army becomes less central? But right now that's not the case. It's very central.

As you know better than I do, the Israeli media landscape is very different from the American media landscape, though they overlap. How has that changed your mind about podcasting? How do you view podcasting differently from Israel?

It's a lot of work podcasting from Israel. One of the challenges of moving here is that a huge chunk of my life gets crammed into 3 PM to 7 PM because 3 PM is kind of the earliest you can expect somebody for a meeting or an interview in the United States when it's going to be 8 PM on the East Coast. And certainly on the West Coast, it's even a bigger difference. So starting around 3 o'clock, my day tends to get a little more crowded and intense. So just on a logistics matter, it's challenging. I don't have a very good feel for the newspaper world here, but newspapers are much more important than they are in America. They haven't died out. They're not just online. It's, it's fun to walk around on an afternoon or a morning in Jerusalem and see 4 or 5 different newspapers out for sale, even if I can't read all of them. Or most of them, and sometimes any of them, because my Hebrew is so embryonic and mediocre, but they come with a flavor. And I think that's part of what you were alluding to. They're more like TV in America, right? They have often an ideology and a certain perspective. American newspapers until recently, I would say pretended they were objective. I think there's less of a pretense lately, but how podcasting fits into that, you know, I don't know. I listened to some Hebrew language podcasts and my Hebrew is not good enough to listen to the other ones. I should maybe be trying, but.

You've remarked to me in the past that in Israel, baseball seems less important to you. Does podcasting seem more or less important there?

That's interesting. Sports does seem less important, partly because the games are on often at 3:10 in the morning here. And I'm not a recorder kind of person, don't have time to watch them at my leisure so much anymore. Econ talk doesn't seem less important. I am surprised at how much I enjoy the challenge of improving the classroom here. We have an amazing set of teachers here. I want them to be better. We're trying to make the evaluation process a little more sophisticated less a customer service scale of 1 to 5, how'd you like your faculty member, your professor, trying to inculcate our faculty to certain styles of teaching and expose them to certain ideas. And I'm enjoying that much more than I thought I would. And I'm much more passionate about it. I'm a little bit dangerous, Tyler. I'm what's called in Hebrew, a new oleh, one who's come upward, who's come up to the land, the land of Israel. And I find my passion for things Israeli and my national identity way out of line with what I thought it would be as a person who's— I've been here many times. I've been here a dozen or so times to visit. I lived here as a teenager for 8 months when I was in high school with my family. My dad's company sent him here. So I sort of thought I knew what it would be like to live here. I knew it wouldn't be the same as being a tourist, but I've been surprised at how much national pride I have, how I'm not quite as interested in what's going on in America. I thought I'd stay connected, either sports, politics, which is just a different form of sports sometimes. But it's very different. And I think you read stories of immigrants who come to America and who are very emotional when they pass their citizenship tests. I feel the same thing here. And it's been a pleasant surprise.

What in the Torah now feels different when you read it living as an Israeli? Or the Hebrew Bible?

Jewish Bible. Yeah. No, no, no. I'm not sure I heard you correctly. It's interesting sitting in a synagogue here on Saturday morning, which I used to do in America. The biggest difference isn't the Torah reading. It's a blessing for the state of Israel, which gets recited every Saturday morning in a Jewish synagogue in America. There's also a prayer for the soldiers of the IDF, the Israel Defense Force. It's much more visceral here. People pay attention, you know, you feel like you're actually saying something that matters and means something. As for the Torah, I think the biggest thing that I felt actually wasn't in services or reading the Bible. It's exploring different parts of the country I hadn't ever been to before. When we first got here early on, we went up north to Golan Heights, which Israel didn't have access to until the 1967 War. It's still controversial in some quarters, of course. Really a stunningly beautiful part country, and you can walk a town called Gamla. Gamla was a Jewish town in Roman times that the Romans destroyed, a little bit like Masada. And, you know, they've uncovered the mosaic floor of a synagogue. There's some houses, the floors and walls of partial houses are still visible. And it's a very wild part of the country. There's big ravines and outcrops, and then in the distance you can see the Sea of Galilee, the Kinneret in Hebrew. It just felt different that there's a Jewish presence in that outpost in the middle of nowhere. That's 2,000 years old. Feel part of something that, you know, obviously intellectually I felt it before I moved here, but moving here and feeling that's very different. And being there and standing on that climb, having that town to ourselves, my wife and I, we hiked to the top. It's a little tiny space, hard to believe that thousands of people live there, but it's a crazy, crazy archaeological experience to be part of that and other things like it. So that's what's to me is more special, you know, the holiest part of Israel most people would say would be the Temple Mount. A Jew would say is the Temple Mount and the Kotel, the wall, the supporting wall of the Temple Mount that Jews pray at every day. Now, if we have access to it since 1967, Jews have been praying there for thousands of years. It's very moving to be there. I'm about an 18 or 20 minute walk from there, and I've been there once since I've been here. In the past, I'd come here every trip, had to make sure I got to the Kotel and the Old City, and I'm surprised how little I've been there. The sort of workaday urban streets of Jerusalem feel special in a way that doesn't require that past hovering over it. It's just nice to be here.

Now, there's a great books emphasis at Shalem, if I understand correctly. If you had a bit more time than you probably have and wanted to choose one or two great books, Hebrew Bible aside, of course, to make sense of your time and experience in Israel, what would you pick and why?

Well, it's crazy. We're a great books curriculum, but there's so many things we try to cover because we also have not just Western civilization, Jewish thought and also other civilizations, our neighborhood, the Middle East neighborhood. So our students read the Jewish Bible, they read the Talmud, they read the Quran, they read the New Testament. And we have a course on Indian culture, civilization, and religion as well. It gets a little crowded. It gets a little crowded.

You're asking me though, what book I would want to read to make sense of your own experience in Israel, which great book?

I'm a sucker. I think I'd pick The Odyssey. It's about travel. Adventures, a sense of home, a very reliable wife who's come with me for this adventure. I've been writing about it recently for my next book, Penelope's decision in dealing with the absence of her husband. But the idea of that book, which I think is just one of my favorite books, is The Odyssey, is the idea that home pulls you, right? And now I have two homes. It's a little bit weird, right? I was born in Memphis, Tennessee. I've never lived long anywhere in the United States. Maryland's the longest. My time in America when I was teaching at George Mason and later working at the Hoover Institution, which I'm still affiliated related with, by the way. 18 years of my 67 were spent in suburban Washington, D.C., which is roughly a quarter and certainly more than a quarter of my adult life. And so there's a certain home there. I have certain friends there. And now all of a sudden this feels like home. And Odysseus, he must have had a lot of ups and downs when he was thinking about whether to come home or not, but came home. So I think that helps me a little bit. Love that book.

Yeah, the United States has, I think, about 330 million people. Yet there are more Israeli TV shows I want to watch than American TV shows. There's Sruim, there's Shetizel, there's Prisoners of War, there's In Judgment, there's Tehran, there's more. Why is Israeli TV so good?

I'm glad you mentioned Prisoners of War. Prisoners of War is in my top 5. If I had to list my top 5, I'd pick Shetizel, Prisoners of War, The Americans, probably The Wire, and The Crown. Do you have a top 5 you could reel off?

Sopranos would be my number 1. Sruim and Prisoners of War plausibly would be in my top 5.

So Prisoner of War, by the way, is very much about—

Curb Your Enthusiasm, that's in my top 5 too.

Well, yeah, kind of a different thing.

Yes, very different thing.

Very different. I mean, what I love about those other ones when they're done well is they're a form of long-form storytelling simply not available to us till now. The closest thing I guess you could have had to it in the past would be a Dickens novel that came out every week and couldn't binge read it. You had to wait for the next installment. And I think, I'm sure there's been many PhD theses written about how the impact of that weekly thing affected Dickens's style and so on. It's an interesting question. I have an answer, but I want to hear your answer first. What's your answer?

I think the audience is more demanding and has evolved into an equilibrium where they expect something more intellectually substantive from television. And precisely because it's not economically so viable, the notion that at the margin you get a much bigger audience by pandering to more people just doesn't go that far in Israel. Now, this may change as Israeli shows themselves become more popular. So I worry about this, but that would be my offhand answer. Smarter, more demanding audience, plus limited incentives to sell out.

That's certainly interesting. There's some really bad Israeli TV shows that I've enjoyed that take weird and strange turns. I'll mention The Good Cop, Ashotei Rotov, which is often in really bad taste and quite amusing. All of a sudden gets really serious in season 2 or 3. It starts off as this sort of silly comedy. Similarly, The Beauty and the Baker, which is this cheesy And there's an American version of it too, but in the Israeli version, it says Baker. He somehow gets tangled up with this movie star, this model, and she's a model, I guess, not a movie star, but you think, ah, this is, it's cheap fun. And all of a sudden it gets really serious. Their families get involved and it takes these strange and inexplicable turns. And I'm sure it's partly driven by the economics of the business. But I think there's another thing to think about, which is Jews created Hollywood. Jews have been making good movies for a long time. You know, we're called the people of the book. We're interested in storytelling. Just a standard thing Jews have been doing for a long time. Now, why Israelis per se are so good at it is an interesting question. It's obviously a function of wealth and the ability now to market those stories to a much wider audience. But I think your point about how, you know, subtitles and Netflix allow that to reach a much wider audience than was available before, it really is kind of a puzzle. They're not particularly designed, I don't think anymore, for the Israeli market. And the real puzzle to me is why they're popular, not why they're so good. Why do people want to watch a Shtisel, which is— not much happens in Shtisel.

There's actual romantic tension. That's the thing with Shtisel and Sruim. In American shows or even European shows, well, you can say, oh, why don't they just divorce? Or why don't they just go to bed together? Or why don't they just whatever? But in Sruim and Shtisel, it's always a question what the boundaries are. And that's hard to recreate.

Yeah, one of my favorite scenes in Stieglitz is when Akiva and, I think it's, Bat-Sheva, or she pretends, or is actually interested in renting a heater from him, a portable radiator. And he's just started this business. He's put up a sign around town. It's very entrepreneurial for him. Doesn't have much to do with himself other than art. And she shows up at the doorway and it lasts about 30 seconds. There's incredible tension in that scene, romantic and sexual tension. And it's because they can't, they're not going to do anything and they're good actors. And so it's a very powerful scene. I've also argued, I think part of the appeal of that show— there's a certain anthropological voyeurism. Here's a culture and a community that's very alien to most people, you know, including modern Orthodox Jews. It's a very different form of religious Judaism, the ultra-Orthodox that they're portraying in that show. And, you know, part of the charm of the show is that, well, they have the same problems we do, you know. They have trouble with their kids, they're not sure, you know, whether they're going to make a living. And so that's part of the charm. But I think the other part of the charm is what you're talking about. There's a certain old-fashionedness there that people may not want to live that way themselves, but they like watching it the way they like reading a Jane Austen novel where the mores of romance are long gone in the past. And there's a certain innocence, I think, to the characters in Shtisel, which makes it so deeply appealing. The only other observation I want to make, which I think is so fascinating to me, is it's a show about ultra-religious, ultra-Orthodox Jews. Some still Judaism in the show. You know, they murmur and mutter blessings under their breath, but there's no glorification of, say, the religious experience of the Shabbat. And they don't make fun of it either. There's no mocking of it or of the attitudes. They're just taken as they are. And I think that was a genius move by the creators to make that show the way it is.

Which Israeli norm is hardest for you to deal with?

Negotiation is challenging. I think it's particularly hard for my wife, who likes set prices. A lot of prices here are just kind of suggestions. They're an invitation to negotiate.. And there are a few settings in America where that's normal. You buy a house or a car, you don't expect to pay list price, but you do expect to pay list price for, say, a haircut or I don't know, a repair or something. But a lot of times the price they announce is just like a hint, a suggestion. And it's very hard for Americans to respond to that. If you come here and you get off the plane and you get in a cab, I don't think the price— this happens in America, right? Prices in America in a cab. Off the meter, often negotiated. Cab driver will say something and, "How about if we don't use the meter? How about a flat rate?" But in America, you kind of know what it's going to be because you've been in cabs in America. As a newcomer, you don't always know how far it's going to be, what the real fare should be. And so you're kind of vulnerable. And so a lot of Americans I know get angry when the cab driver says, "Let's take it off the meter and pay cash." They say, "Well, no, put it on the meter." And then a friend of mine was telling me he got yelled at by the cab driver. Like, "I don't want to put it on the meter." I was thinking, "But that's the job. That's the rule. Come on, put it on the meter." And I think the anger of the cab driver was really just, hey, we're negotiating here, we're having fun, here's the game. It's not theater, but it is a game. And there is some theater involved because you don't know how the drama is going to end. But I think here it's a little bit of the fabric of daily life, right? And that's a little strange. It takes some getting used to. I think when I rented my apartment here, I think it was an 8 or 10-page lease. I had to hire a lawyer. Never had a lawyer for a lease. I've dozen places and 20 places in America. That was strange. What I do to sign the lease, things I had to do to get the lease done, you know, insurance I bought, weird stuff that just doesn't happen in America. And it's all in Hebrew. So that part's kind of challenging. Anything else? Those are the ones that come to mind.

An Israeli friend of mine suggested I ask you the following question, quote, are you tired of being a fryer, unquote?

Yeah, fryer is the slang phrase. I assume it's Yiddish.

It sounds Yiddish to me.

There's a few Yiddish words that get peppered into Israeli daily speech. Not much, not like you'd think, because of course the early days of Israel was very much a revolt against the Eastern European mentality. And Hebrew was going to be spoken here, not Yiddish. And Jews here were going to be strong and proud, not hunched over a book, and they were going to fight in the army. And there's a certain huge pride actually in that here. And as a result, the best slang is Arabic. There's an enormous number of Arabic words that are used daily. I like to tease my Israeli friends that there's no Hebrew word for fun. And when you tell them that, they say, whoa, yes, there is keff. It's an Arabic word. It's, they had to import it. It's kind of a cheap shot at the seriousness of life here. And it's not true. There's a lot of vibrancy and people here have a lot of fun, but there's no native Hebrew word for fun. I blame it on Ben Yehuda. But the word fryer is a very, very interesting word. And it's an interesting aspect of human nature because it means a sucker. And some Americans here will talk about the fryer tax, you know, the amount of money extra you pay because you just don't know what you're doing here. You're just lost. You don't know the norms.. And I try not to worry about being a friar. I view it as it's a form of charity. I have a comfortable life. I can pay a little bit extra. It's not a problem. Happy to do it. But people worry about it, I think, emotionally. And I think it's an important part of human nature that economics doesn't have much to say about. The fear that you're being taken advantage of drives a lot of bad behavior on both sides of various transactions if you don't have a good level of trust.

As you well know, a significant portion of the population of Israel is Arabic in descent. What do you think you're learning about those Arabic cultures living in Israel?

Not as much as I'd like to yet. I mean, I've only been here 6 months. There's a lot of— it partly depends on where you live, of course, but in the parts of Jerusalem that I live in and walk in near our campus here, there's a lot of Arab Israelis. Most people don't know this. I don't know it well, so I may embarrass myself, but people who are born within the borders of the Jewish state right now and the borders of Israel who are not Jewish, Arab Israelis, are full citizens. They get full healthcare, they get to go subsidized to the universities, they vote. They don't serve in the army, which is fascinating. They don't want to serve in the army, incidentally, which I also understand is complicated for them. And those are distinct from the West Bank and Gaza who are Palestinians. Then there's some special categories of folks who live in East Jerusalem, which is a disputed more challenging, and I don't know all the ins and outs of that. But my wife is going to Ulpan. Ulpan is Hebrew lessons. She goes to Ulpan 3 hours a day, 4 days a week. 22 of her 23, I think, or 21 of her 23 classmates are Arab-Israelis who think their Hebrew is not good. And they all speak Hebrew. They speak very good English, but their Hebrew is not good enough. So they're improving their Hebrew because they want to go to a good university. They want to get a good education. They want to be in business and they're all young, by the way. They're all in their 20s. I don't have much exposure to the Arab-Israeli population yet. That's something to find out about.

We are both non-Muslims.

Yeah.

What is it you think we can or should learn from the Quran?

I don't know the Quran. I love the religious Muslims I've met face to face, as opposed to the ones that are called the cultural zeitgeist of Islam that's in the air in the West. But the actual Muslims that I've met face to face, you know, I have a lot in common with them. We believe in God. I think they have a very deep, deep faith, which some Jews have, but not all. Even religious Jews, I think, struggle with faith in a way that many Muslims and Christians, for that matter, don't struggle with. So I think there's something to learn there. I think it's possible. I'm naive. I like to think there's a way that the great religions of the world would get along a little bit better, the followers of those religions. And on the ground face-to-face, I think we get along pretty well, but not going so well overall in the outside world. So work to do. And as an economist, I like to think that commercial interaction helps. Do you think that helps? What do you think of this view that trade leads to peace?

I think it's been overrated by many of us. At many margins, clearly it's true. But trade also helps you build up weaponry. Trade can solidify groups within a nation. An overrated proposition, though on average true. That's how I would classify it.

Yeah, I like that. I'm going to use that. Thank you. I'll cite you too. It's good.

So late 19th century Europe had plenty of trade, right? The world was remarkably globalized and you get World War I, you get World War II. I'm not saying the trade caused that, but you can see it's what you might call a complicated regression.

Yeah, I agree.

Here's another religious question. The Knesset recently, as you know, they voted to loosen up kosher certification regulations. And take away power from a group of rabbis. Now, that's a kind of deregulation. You're a market-oriented economist. Are you happy or should you be worried as a religious observant Jew that this could mean a higher probability of some Israelis eating non-kosher food?

Yeah, it's a fascinating example. Listeners should know that Stiesel is not the modal family in Israel. The ultra-Orthodox are a percentage of the country and they're politically powerful percentage because they tend to vote as a block, but they're really all kinds of variations now, both religiously and non-religiously in Israel that are extremely fascinating. The many Jews here are secular. Their Judaism is that they live in a Jewish state. Now, there are other Jews who are religious, and then in between that, there's all kinds of stuff happening here that's really fascinating. I recommend the book The Wandering Jew by Micha Goodman, came out in the last few years, about what's going on on the ground here Israel and the amount of religious innovation that's happening and how people who are, quote, not religious are connecting to Jewish texts. People who are religious are leading more open lives. I think it's the tension between the religious and the non-religious here is somewhat overrated. Having said that, some of the source of that tension is governmental mandates that treat, give, say, preferences for subsidies to childbearing, which the ultra-Orthodox tend to have much, much larger families. Families are much larger here in Israel than in America generally, secular and religious, but the ultra-Orthodox tend to have the larger families, and they've used their political power to get both subsidies for children, exemptions from army service, and other forms of special treatment that non-religious Jews, not surprisingly, find offensive. So I don't think the alliance of the state with the Jewish religion has necessarily been a good thing. Many people before me have pointed out that United States is a generally a more religious country than Europe. There's no state religion in America. Most of Europe has state religion. The state doesn't do anything particularly well, and it doesn't tend to lead to good feelings about religion, and has not over time. So when you ask the question, if you take away some monopoly power from the rabbinic, the rabbinic authorities here, are you going to get less kosher food? The answer is you might get more kosher food. It's a lot of resentment of the way that the kosher certification has worked here. A lot of people feel that a lot of times a fee is collected and not much supervision takes place. These are non-religious people who resent that they're paying for something that gives them the certificate they need to serve their religious customers, but don't like the hypocrisy of that system. It's a fantastic example, by the way, of the natural assumption most people have that when there's a law, it gets enforced, or when there's a law, the government does it well, or And people say to me, "What if we move to a more decentralized system? People won't be able to trust the kosher certification." Like, you sure you trust it now? When the government has a monopoly driven by rabbinic oversight? A lot of people say it doesn't work so well. So I'm excited about the role competition might play in the process. And I think it'll lead to cheaper kosher food, more kosher food, more restaurants offering certified kosher food that I think will actually be kosher and will be fine.

Let me give you a perspective I sometimes hear from Israelis But I'm gonna put this in maybe more public choice terminology than they would use. So I've heard it argued that secular Israelis, to some extent, free ride upon the more stricter, more religious Israelis who do more to shore up the unity of Judaism or the cultural foundation of the country. And thus, that as part of the bargain, the more extreme religious individuals have to be given some kinds of political preferences to keep them on board. As you know, decades ago, Many of the ultra-Orthodox were anti-Zionist rather than Zionist, as they now tend to be. So there is actual pressure where everyone has to be in the Reicheresque winning coalition and things like monopoly power over kosher certification, whatever it's going to be, but you have to give them something. Is that an accurate way of thinking about the Israeli political dilemma?

Well, it's not accurate. It might be useful.

Is it useful?

I've never heard that quite that way. By the way, I think many of the wide range of views about what the role of the state should be in the country and whether the government should be more sympathetic or less sympathetic to the religious currents here. Jerusalem tends to be a more, quote, religious city than Tel Aviv. But there are plenty of Orthodox people and religious people in Tel Aviv, and there's plenty of non-observant people here in Jerusalem. They tend to have different rules about how Sabbath is kept in terms of public services and cultural norms also, of course, play a role. But I don't like that idea. As a Jew, I don't like that idea. As a religious person, I don't like the idea that this is this implicit bargain that somehow the ultra-Orthodox are, what, carrying the water or the ballast, or I don't know what you would call it, anchoring the Jewishness of the country. It's not even, I don't think it's an issue for most Israelis to think about it that way. I don't think it would come natural. I think that's definitely a Riker-esque reference to William Riker, who I got to be a colleague for about 5 years at the University of Rochester. He's a wonderful, wonderful man, very insightful and incredible twinkle in his eye. And his work, I think you've probably read it, Tyler. He was applying a lot of economics tools in his day, long before other folks. He's kind of, I think, forgotten among our colleagues, but I like him a lot.

Does living in Israel and being a citizen there make you more or less utilitarian in your moral philosophy? Why would it?

Curious. You have something in mind?

Well, for instance, the Israeli policies toward hostages, as I understand them, which is imperfectly. But from what I can tell, I admire these views. The notion that if someone takes hostages, you simply have to look at the longer-term calculation and you can't cave to every demand. You need to play it quite tough.

Is that utilitarian or non-utilitarian?

From my point of view, it's utilitarian. But I'm asking you, I'm not insisting you take my point of view. Living in Israel, has it made you more or less utilitarian?

I'm not much of a utilitarian. I think all of us have some utilitarian impulses by, you know, there's certain cases where it's overwhelmingly clear that too many people benefit from something or the size of it's so large. I think our profession has been so damaged, our profession, I mean economics, by the Benthamite calculus. I went and read Bentham in the last year. Have you read any Bentham?

Of course. I'm a big Bentham fan, though I'm not at all a pure utilitarian. But even on issues such as gay rights or animal welfare or monetary theory or usury laws or tariffs. He's a fantastic thinker and economist. Penal reform.

How about the designated hitter? I mean, you're showing his incredible breadth.

I don't think Bentham wrote about the designated hitter. I disliked it in baseball, but that's maybe topic for another podcast.

It is, but I have to ask, do you still dislike it? You still anti-DH?

I've become neutral only in the sense that I've stopped caring about baseball. So I would be anti-DH.

Why have you stopped caring about baseball? You haven't moved to Israel. What's the story?

I've moved other places and it's too time-consuming. It's hard to watch in chunks. I think it's a less efficient game than it used to be.

Yeah, they've tried to speed it up. They've tried some ways to speed it up. It's really not just the total time, it's everything, right? It's not a game made for the TikTok generation, for sure. I don't mean to imply that you're a TikTok person.

Or even the YouTube generation, right?

Yeah, exactly. But going back to Bentham, I haven't read a lot of Bentham, but I was surprised at how little he has to say. He gives you this overarching theory, that we can take all of our pains and pleasures. It's very important to emphasize this, you know, the pleasures aren't just physical pleasures. It's not just about gluttony or animal drives. He understands pride and he understands satisfactions and more ethereal and other kinds. But he gets into a problem, which is that after a while, when you start adding them all up, you can't add them up anymore. They can't really be quantified, as far as I understand. I'd be curious your take on that. He never could solve that problem. You know, we try to solve it as economists through money, not literally money, but by putting a monetary value. So I'm going to— in the next 5 minutes, Tyler, I'm going to say something embarrassing about your past that I've discovered. And I could ask you— it's just an example, Tyler. I don't really know anything. I can't imagine there's anything embarrassing. But suppose I knew something about you and I said, you know, Tyler, before the show, I said, you know, I'm thinking of saying this. How much would you pay me not to say it? And I'm not going to collect the bribe. So I'm blackmailing you in that story. And in the way economists use the utilitarian framework, is everything's a form of that calculus. So the Grand Canyon, the view of the Grand Canyon, is that a monetary transaction? Of course not. But we can ask the question, how much would you pay to be able to continue to see the Grand Canyon for the rest of your life? How would you pay for your children to be able to see it? And that way I can trade that off in theory against other things and create a scale. And the problem with that scale, of course, is every good economist knows, and many bad ones don't, is that the scale depends on how much money you have. It's not a real scale of pleasure and pain. It's a scale for me. So my ability then to compare my costs and benefits to yours is, I think, zero. But as economists, we don't like that. We want to aggregate. We want to be able to say this is a good policy because the net gains are positive, or this is a bad policy, the net gains are negative. Do you agree with that? I think it's horrible.

I would put it this way, insofar as we can aggregate,— and to make a choice, a policy choice, you have to aggregate in some manner. But I think we aggregate by making moral judgments about different kinds of well-being. And in this sense, utilitarianism is parasitic on non-utilitarian moral theories about which pleasures and pains we count and for how much, and even how we understand what pleasure is. There's not a simple physiological definition as a, you know, a unidimensional measurable variable. So it's all to me parasitic on pluralistic moral value theory, which makes me not a Benthamite.

Yeah.

And I think Mill understood this about Bentham. Bentham's utilitarianism is the weakest part of his philosophy, but I think he's a wonderful thinker, and if you read more of him, you'd be very impressed.

Okay, I'm gonna let you create a reading list for me. Not a very long one, Tyler, though. Okay. But you can give me 25 pages to start with that I may have missed. I want to just go back to that for a second, if I could, and since it's my program— well, it's not really, it's ours today, so I'm semi-host today— but I want to ask you this. When I think about marriage, my advisor is Gary Becker, his theories of marriage, mathematical models of marriage. Do you think it's a reasonable thought to compare two people as potential mates for yourself, oneself? In other words, let's suppose a person's considering two different spouses and you choose one and they're willing to marry you. And as economists, we say, well, there's revealed preference. You pick the one you thought was better for you. How would you begin to conceptualize what better means in that context? And I think the risk, and I think that the easy way to think about it is more fun. Fun broadly defined, meaning day-to-day life will be better with this person than the other person. That's my expectation. And I think that's a bizarro— and the more where I've thought about this, I'm happily married, but this book I'm writing next called Wild Problems is about these kind of challenges. Is it really a meaningful statement in the sense that there are so many different aspects of marriage in life, in all kinds of choices we make like this, that aren't about just what it's like to be around them. It includes things like pride, include things like sense of purpose, include sense like meaning. And when I take a job, obviously I don't take the job that pays the most necessarily. Take the job that I think will be the best, meaning a mix of non-monetary and monetary benefit. Is it really a meaningful statement if one job gives me a huge amount of pride and the other I'm kind of embarrassed about. Do I really think I can trade those off and put up, you know, a number on those? This Benthamite calculus to me is about this idea that we could put a scalar, a single number, after we've aggregated everything up. I think that's kind of a fool's game.

Here's how I would put that tension: with so many choices, including having kids, you're choosing what kind of person do you want to be, which is fine, identity. But once you have two different possible persons you could be, two or more, Which of those gets to do the ordinal choosing? That's indeterminate. And that's another reason why I think pure utilitarianism, whether of the cardinal or ordinal variety, is self-undercutting. It needs to pull in values from outside of the utility itself.

You know, we talked about this on the program with L.A. Paul, talking about the vampire problem, right? Before you're a vampire, looks pretty grotesque. After you're a vampire, it's fantastic. What I'm suggesting in my new book is that, well, it might be fantastic. And so her conclusion is rationality is ill-defined. Mine is, yeah, but I don't want to be a vampire. It's kind of gross. I don't care how fantastic I think it's going to be. And you get to live forever, I think, if you play your cards right. I just think we bring in other, as you say, other value systems into that calculus. I like that phrase, undercuts it.

I have a very easy question for you now.

Okay.

If there's a conflict between the ethnic religious identity of Israel and the democratic nature of Israel, what philosophic standard do you apply to resolve that conflict? Easiest question of the hour, right?

You just flip a coin. I think I talk about that in the book also, by the way. There's a beautiful poem by Piet Hein where he says, and I've heard other people say this, you flip the coin so that you'll know what to root for, and that tells you what you really want. Piet Hein was a great science thinker, mathematician. So here's this guy saying, oh yeah, flip the coin so you can find out what your gut is really hoping for and use that to make the decision. I write about— that's part of what I'm interested in this book about. But when I think about— it's a really interesting tension that you're identifying, especially for a religious person. I don't want to live in a theocracy, Jewish or otherwise. I'm a big believer in competition to make the world a better place, under some constraints, of course. I don't know, was it 30 years ago? Everybody knew that Israel was going to struggle to stay a Jewish state because birth rates were low among the Jewish population. They were high among the Arab-Israeli population. And soon Israel will be in this weird predicament of being a Jewish state where the Jews were a minority. People did not foresee the fall of the Soviet Union and the influx of millions of Russian Jews into Israel. So Israel's really kind of avoided the existential threats that would require a very, very non-democratic response. But it's not a democratic place like America. Any Jew can come live here if they can prove that they're Jewish, but much harder if you're not. I'm a big fan of open borders, but I do want there to be a Jewish state. So there's an inconsistency there for me that's somewhat troubling, but I'm happy to maintain that the ethnic religious character that you referred to as Jewish state. I have to say that, you know, it used to be when I was growing up, oh, that's pleasant. You know, it's nice to have a Jewish state. The last 10 years, last 5 years, I've actually thought there really has to be a Jewish state. We actually are living in a world where antisemitism was unimaginable 20 years ago is now increasingly common or not surprising. I think it's scary. So-called Jewish question, you know, what's the Jew's role in the world when they're a citizen of another country? It's back and hard to imagine. I'm shocked by it. Are you surprised by that? I know it doesn't touch you the way it touches me or my children, but are you surprised that antisemitism is actually— people get killed for being Jews in the United States? Didn't think it could happen. Doesn't happen very often. I'm not paranoid about it, but it's surprising it happens at all.

I would just say I have worked very hard over the last 20 years to try to root out recency bias in my expectations. So fewer bad things surprise me than used to. Is how I would put it. Because if you look at broader history, right, it's a pretty common event, as are many other bad things. And we suffer from recency bias. We think, oh, what we've seen over the 20 or 30 years where the centrality of our own growing up happened is somehow special, but it's not.

Yeah, tomorrow will be like yesterday until it isn't. I'm curious, I got way overexcited about Theranos and way overexcited about driverless cars. Is that the same phenomenon? Meaning all the hype and excitement that this was different, that they'd solved this problem, that there was going to be this new world. I'd call it more of an optimism bias. I wanted to believe that we'd solved, improved, transformed. Did you fall prey to that?

Well, I think you were right to be excited about driverless vehicles. They're not going to revolutionize the world tomorrow, but I think that will happen within our lifetimes in a significant way. Theranos, I just wasn't paying that much attention to. I have become successively less skeptical about longevity research. I would say that, but I think it's a long, slow haul and a tough slog. So I don't have a utopian vision there, but I think there's so much talent now working on those problems. We'll make some progress on them. Those would be my two responses.

Yeah, it's hard to know. I was just surprised that there were so many smart people and I just got swept up in the excitement. So many smart people who said, you know, within 3 years we're going to have driverless cars, 35,000 lives saved because there won't be any deaths on the highway. True, there might be a few more pedestrians killed, but it's going to be a huge advantage for improvement in human life. And I think the technical problems there turned out to be quite a bit more daunting. And I think a different kind of bias is we just sort of assume that technology and focus will solve anything. And often it does. Amazing. Getting a vaccine in the weekend, that was a great moment of human achievement. But so many other things turned out to be harder.

Another super easy question. Let's say we think that under current circumstances, a two-state solution would not lead to security either for Israel or for the resulting Palestinian state. Many people believe that. Let's say also, as I think you believe, that a one-state solution where just everyone votes would not lead to security for current vision of Israel or even a modified version of it. And let's say also that the current reliance of the Palestinian territories on the state of Israel for protection, security, intelligence, water, many important features of life prevent those governing bodies from ever attaining sufficient autonomy to be a credible peace partner, guarantor of its own security, and so on. From that point of view, what do we do? So we're not utilitarians, right? So we're thinking about what's right and wrong. What's the right thing to do?

There's an expression from the Talmud to answer something on one foot because you can't stand on one foot for very long. So it just means You know, for some people it means you got 30 seconds. There are some baseball pitchers who could probably stand on one foot for an hour or two. But so you want me to answer this on one foot? There's no answer. And I think I mentioned Micah Goodman a minute ago for his book, The Wandering Jew. He has another fascinating book called Catch 67, which explores the contradictions and inconsistencies with different worldviews toward the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in an incredibly thoughtful way. I recommend that book. It's the best book you can read about what's going on here politically and intellectually and emotionally. It's a phenomenal book. And part of his insight is it's wrong to look for a solution. If I remember the book correctly, I read it quickly, but think about ways to live with it. Think about ways to make life better. Think about ways to move toward improvement rather than fixing it. And I think the American foreign policy establishment has spent the last decades just trying to, quote, fix it. It may not be fixable. It's hard to admit that as a, quote, rational person. It's hard to admit it as a person who lives here. By the way, I should just mention, people have written me in the last month saying, is it scary there? Would you be afraid to raise your children there if you had young children? It's an incredible place to raise children. Children here run free without fear. They play in a way that American children used to be allowed to play. I played that way growing up. It's still true here. There's very little crime on the streets, very little street crime, very little theft, very little burglary and so on. But there is threat of terrorism. You're much more likely to get stabbed. In Jerusalem than you are in New York City. But of course, it's not common, thank God, at least so right now, but it's serious. And then you got Iran. And as I alluded to earlier, it's a tough neighborhood. So I think it behooves, if I may use a word that's out of fashion, it behooves us all to think about ways to both reduce the security threat to Israel and to improve the lives of the people who, of course, in the West Bank and Gaza and elsewhere, they're not very good democracies, even though sometimes there are elections. I don't, I don't necessarily believe that the person on the street there is— I don't know what their attitudes are. They can't give an honest answer out of fear. So I wouldn't rely on survey data. I think there's certainly a lot of people in those parts of the world, our neighbors here, our cousins, who just want to lead a normal life and have a better life for their children like most people aspire to. So how do you improve that? I would love to have more commercial interaction, although I agree with you that trade is not a panacea. Or is that it is a panacea. I can't remember where I've traveled with that word, but I think there used to be more commercial interaction between the Palestinian population and Israel because it was more peaceful. And now that the threat of terrorism is there, Israel's walled off its borders to those neighborhoods and those parts of the world, Gaza. It's scary. And that's a tragedy. And they live horribly there. It's a very tough place to live, Gaza. Egypt's not very nice to them either, by the way. They have closed border with Egypt. So the real problem right now is that Israel doesn't have a negotiating partner. Who thinks that Israel has a right to exist. So Hamas doesn't recognize Israel's right to exist. It's hard to imagine a two-state solution with that. So how do you improve things along the way? I think you look for ways to do some commercial interaction. I think the other thing reminds me a little bit of, I'll say it this way, this is the Middle East. There are cultural norms here that are not the same as in America. I think a lot of Americans have no understanding of that. Certainly American Jews don't. I don't think American negotiators understand it so well, probably. The role that pride, face, dignity plays as opposed to say, quote, narrow self-interest, narrowly defined. I think it's much greater for those other intangible things. And personally, I'd like to see Israel try a different kind of move toward normalcy. But I also understand that I'm naive and have only lived here 6 months and have very little thoughtful to say about that, that I would want anyone to pay attention to because it's a different neighborhood than where I came from in Maryland., and it's not easily understood. And what might be seen as a generous gesture in Maryland might be seen differently here and vice versa. Something that's harsh in Maryland might be seen very differently here. And so Israelis have their own cultural baggage, not just that they're part of this Middle Eastern culture that they share to some extent with their neighbors. Israelis are very proud of their self-reliance. I'll tell you a story. Again, I've only been here 6 months, but this is an old story. It tells you something. I'm flying out of JFK. I have to get to Israel to visit one of my kids who's studying here for the year. There's a special program for the parents, and it's a small window for me to get here in time to enjoy the program with my son. And JFK is— every flight's canceled. It's snowing, just this relentless hour after hour blanketing the city. And I leave Midtown Manhattan to go to JFK, and my flight on El Al, the Israeli airline, is still not canceled somehow. The cab can't go faster than 20 miles an hour. There's no one on the road. Our cab's the only car on the road. Takes us about 45 minutes or an hour to get to JFK and at 20 miles an hour. And I get to the desk to check my bags and they ask me the security questions, which El Al does differently than anybody else. And they take my bag and I get to the front desk and I say, you know, to get my boarding pass. And they say, can I help you? I said, yeah, I'm on flight such and such. And I said, we're not leaving tonight, are we? We're not really going to fly in this. I mean, this flight's going to be canceled. I'm 2 hours early, right? It's still going to keep snowing the whole time. And she looks at me and she says, You know, our pilots are from the Israeli Air Force, and the rule here is it's the pilot's call. They can decide they're uncomfortable flying and cancel flight anytime. She said, as long as the airport's open, we're going to fly. Those pilots, they're going to fly. They're confident that they can fly through that storm. You know, there's something beautiful about that, something scary. I was really excited because I wanted to get to see my son, but I was thinking, I don't know if that's always my mentality. That's the Israeli mentality. We'll get it done. We'll take care of it. It'll work out. And, you know, we're joking a lot— not joking, but we're talking around these issues of bluntness and this culture here. But there's a vitality and national pride here that's so missing in America these days. And I'm very worried about the future of America. And it's a different set of worries here, but they're not bad worries relative to what America is dealing with. Are you optimistic about the future of America as a country?

I would put it this way. I'm increasingly optimistic about economic issues, technological issues, and even American democracy, contrary to most people. But I am increasingly worried about the possible collapse of geopolitical stability in places such as Taiwan, Ukraine, parts of Africa. So I'm not sure if I'm optimistic or pessimistic as a whole. I'm relatively optimistic about North America compared to the rest of the world, for sure.

Yes, you are.

Because it's geopolitically secure, right?

Because it can't be invaded.

Not really.

It's harder to invade. Yeah.

And it has enough of its own resources, right? If we were cut off, we would in different ways manage.

Of course, we could destroy ourselves from within. I'm now putting my American passport— I'm still American citizen also— with the way we could destroy ourselves from within.

I always ask people, are you short the market? And they never say yes. There's a lot of hemming and hawing, but I think it's become a kind of protective talisman to over-worry about American democracy because people feel angst about the content of what it's producing, which a lot of that I would agree with, but I think it will continue. And American democracy has looked and sounded ugly for most of its history, getting back to recency bias.

Great example.

And maybe it sounded better in the '80s and '90s. Yeah. But for American democracy to be lunacy is in fact part of our history. But let me close with two final questions. One is super easy. The other is very hard.

Can I have the easy one first? Sure. I mean, we'll run out of time.

It seems to me Israel faces a pending or even current shortage of unskilled labor and is also committed to the idea of being a Jewish state. And countries like Switzerland that I never thought would take in a lot of outsiders have done so because it makes economic sense.

Yeah.

So how will Israel address this question? That's the easy one.

That's the easy one. Oh, great. Oh, no.

Is everything going to be robots and driverless cars? But you don't believe in those anymore. So who does all the work?

Work. I think robots are pretty powerful, but we're not going to have driverless cars for a while. We're going to still have drivers. Again, I'm a newcomer. There's a lot of debate here that I've not paid close attention to before I arrived about immigrants from other countries. There's a lot of people here from Asia who do some of the jobs that Israelis don't want to do at market wages here. And there's people from Eritrea and other places. It's really a national identity issue that the Israeli people will work out through their really complicated and not so a perhaps robust democracy— pretty robust, you know, it's 70 years now, it's pretty amazing, heading towards 75. But I think it's a bit of a fallacy. I know you don't subscribe to it, but a lot of people do, that, well, if we don't import workers to do those jobs, no one will do them. And that's not true. What will happen is, if you have something of a market economy, the wages rise and they become more attractive to the native population. Immigrants aren't needed. And some of the things— the prices rise so much, they be done anymore. People won't want them at those higher prices it would take to pay for those services. So there's a temptation always to look for the efficient solution, the one that's financially wise, but there are other aspects. And I think, you know, Brexit and other decisions that populations are making in the modern world are a view that there are things more important than money. I don't think that's ever going to change. I think, as I've said before, a good economist understands that, a bad economist focuses on it. An episode. I don't know when it's coming out. It might come out before this. I think it's now coming out. I can't remember. I think it's before this with Megan McArdle on Roger Scruton's book, Where We Are, which is about the role that place plays in our emotional wellbeing and our heart and our decision-making. And I think those things are really important and people care a lot about them, especially here in Israel. Their connection to the land, their connection to their country, their sense of identity that we alluded to earlier. That I think is extremely important here. You know, Israel make the decision. They might be willing to pay a price. Israelis might be willing to pay a higher price for a bunch of stuff to have it done by Israeli sources or not get done at all. America's got that same issue, right? It's the same challenge. A lot of people like the idea of inexpensive food, you know, fruit and vegetables picked by inexpensive labor, home repairs done by inexpensive labor, all immigrant, often illegal perhaps. And a lot of people like that. A lot of people like what comes with that, which is more interesting life, more interesting types of people. But some people don't like it, and the fact that they're gonna pay a higher price for some things, that doesn't surprise me that they're willing to make that trade-off.

Okay, and here's the hard question, and it's hard because you actually have to solve it.

Okay.

In your new job, what is your next task?

Well, that's an easy question, Tyler.

But you have to do it. That's much harder than the others.

But I have to do it by myself, and then I don't have to pretend I understand something I don't understand, like preventing warfare among people who've been fighting for a long time, tragically. The thing I really have to do is that in about 1 hour, we have our first gala dinner here of alumni, which we haven't had because of COVID It's amazing thing right now in Israel, right? This is December 2021. We've closed our borders to the United States, which means that my youngest son can't come visit us for winter break like he planned to. A lot of people can't come to their kids', their grandchildren's life cycle events. And until I'd say about a month ago, when Omicron was just a glint in somebody's eye or throat. People here are living a totally normal life. I mean, it's just totally normal. We have these mask mandates, like on the buses you're supposed to wear a mask. Even the driver's not wearing his mask. Well, excuse me, they're all wearing it. Nobody's wearing it over their nose and mouth, very few. The older people are generally, but the younger people either wearing it under their chin, maybe a little over their mouth, but not their nose. And I think with Omicron, the level of anxiety has risen here Some. I assume it's risen there where you are as well. But we've got a gala dinner tonight and there's going to be 125 alums of this place. We've only had 5 years of graduates. So that's the first thing I'm doing, but that's not really your question. What am I doing that I can share that's not too secretive or important? I'll tell you another thing we're doing, which is glorious. Leon Kass is our new dean of faculty. He's 82, taught the great books at the University of Chicago and St. John's for for over 3 decades, often with his wife Amy, who's passed on, but who was an incredible teacher also. And Leon's just an incredible visionary educationally. So one of the thrills of this job is sitting in on the faculty colloquium, which he started, and listening to my colleagues, our faculty members, talk about a text that they love. And we have a faculty member, Asaf Umbari. He's a great Israeli novelist, at least I hope so. I can't read his books, they're in Hebrew, they haven't been translated yet, but they're popular, I think, among the right people. He taught a class last week and a half ago. He chose a poem by Yeats, and the poem was "After Long Silence." I'm a Yeats fan. I love Yeats. And I picked up this poem and I looked at it and I thought, I have no idea what this poem's about. It's trouble. And then I read it again before the colloquium, get anything out of it again. And for 90 minutes, we studied it with other faculty members from all different departments. And I got some light, a lot of light, actually. It's a beautiful poem. Doesn't have much rhythm to it. The rhythm's disjointed. There's some lines that are in pentameter, some aren't. And Asaf said, "This is Yeats. Don't you think he did that on purpose? You don't like the rhythm of the poem? Maybe you ought to think about whether this is part of the poem." So it was an amazing, glorious experience. That's my favorite thing about working here, that and going to choir practice with the students here and pretending I can sing. And I'm looking forward to seeing them tonight. That's kind of a cheap ducking of your question, but it's the best I can do, I think.

Russ Roberts, thank you very much.

Thank you, Tyler Cowen.

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