This Is Why It's So Hard To Cut Public Spending

The Trump administration has come into office with big ambitions to lower the size of the US deficit. So far, a number of small items have been identified as possible waste. But to meaningfully bend the curve on spending, there's widespread agreement that we'd have to look at things like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and defense. This is hard stuff to cut and it's something that governments around the world have long struggled with. How do you pull back on a prior commitment that your constituency has come to expect? In this episode of the podcast, we speak with Firtz Bartel, an assistant professor of international affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M. He is also the author of the recent book The Triumph of Broken Promises, which examines the simultaneous economic crisis in the US, UK, and Soviet Union during the 1970s, and how each country was forced economically to essentially "break promises." We talk about what it takes politically to maintain domestic credibility for any government while undergoing such wrenching choices, and why some systems are better suited for it than others. Read More:Trump Tax Cuts’ Cost Estimated at $5 Trillion to $11 TrillionJudge Temporarily Halts Trump, Musk Federal Worker ‘Buyout’ Only http://Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finance is increasingly being built on digital rails. But as the adoption of virtual assets, tokenization and stable coins grows, can regulation not only keep pace but help accelerate it? Find out more later in the podcast.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting

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  and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 1:41Speaker 01

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• 1:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 2:02Tracy Alloway?

  And I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 2:04Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, spending cuts in the air these days.

• 2:09Tracy Alloway?

  You could say that. It's a vibe shift.

• 2:11Joe Weisenthal?

  It's a vibe shift, for sure.

• 2:13Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah. So, under the Trump administration, obviously, there is a stated ambition to reduce spending and make the government more efficient overall.

• 2:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. Scott Bessin, I think he has something, the 3-3-3 Plan. Part of it, I think he wants 3% growth, 3% more oil production, and then 3% deficit. And I think deficits are around 6% currently, which is really high by historical standards, especially because we're at, what, 4.1% unemployment. Usually, when the economy is running this hot or this tight, you don't expect to see deficits this large. Add in rates as high as they are, there does seem to be this impulse, for better or worse, and other people can be the judge of that, to cut spending. But on the other hand, it's very difficult.

• 3:03Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, why do you say that? Because early in my career, there was the Eurozone crisis. And I think there was some austerity imposed in places like Greece, ultimately. So, why do you say it's difficult?

• 3:15Joe Weisenthal?

  So, actually, there's two things here. And I think that's really apt, and I think this is a fascinating question in its own right, which is, why is it that in 2009, 2010, in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis, when we had widespread unemployment, why was the appetite for austerity so high then, at a time when there was so little aggregate demand? And now, at a time when, you know, obviously, inflation has been running hot and so forth, why does it seem more difficult? That in itself is a fascinating question. But I guess what I would say to answer your question specifically is that anytime people talk about cuts, there is not a ton of discretionary spending in the US government budget. There's the entitlement, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and then there's defense.

• 4:02Joe Weisenthal?

  Which there's usually not much political appetite to cut. And then when you have leftover, it's hard to move the dial. And so the theory is that if you actually want to move the dial on spending and deficits, you have to like, cut into some areas. You have to break promises, perhaps, that you've made to various constituencies like seniors.

• 4:22Tracy Alloway?

  Right. Ultimately, you're inflicting pain on someone. And at least in democratic governments, because it's all about a numbers game. It's all about getting votes. That would be a bad thing.

• 4:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, we have to then talk about, how do the stars align? If you actually want to meaningfully cut spending, how does that actually happen? How do democratically elected governments sort of build the political capacity to inflict pain, perhaps, on groups that obviously have some stature? We really do have the perfect guest. We are going to be speaking with Fritz Bartel. He is an assistant professor of international affairs at the Bush School at Texas A&M. And he is the author of the book, came out in 2022, The Triumph of Broken Promises, The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism. And it's kind of about exactly this topic, how governments break promises. So Professor Bartel, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

• 5:20Speaker 04

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 5:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Your book is really interesting because you talk about this sort of resource constraints and spending constraints in the US, the UK, and the Soviet Union, all of it was sort of building up to a head in the late 1970s, early 80s. Before reading your book, that hadn't clicked to me that all of these different economies were sort of facing the same stresses at the same time. What was going on that suddenly around the world, governments felt this impulse? Like, we have to cut, we have to constrain ourselves?

• 5:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I guess the short answer is that the kind of post-World War II economic boom had run aground in the 1970s. Obviously, there was the kind of birth of stagflation. There was a decline in productivity growth across Western economies. The Soviet economy and the Eastern Bloc, more generally the Communist Bloc. Block had run into the end of their growth model, kind of this hyper industrialization growth model had started to produce fewer and fewer results. So in both the Eastern Bloc, the communist world and the West, the growth model, one largely based on kind of industrialization, certainly based on cheap energy resources, had started to run aground

• 6:35Speaker 04

  roughly at similar kind of moments in the early 1970s. And then these crises that kind of came to define the 1970s, the energy shock of 1973, again in 1979, the monetary confusion and shocks of the 1970s also spurred a great deal of inflation and crisis across the world. And so in both East and West, the societies had largely concluded that they did not have the resources to meet the commitments that they previously had made to their constituencies, or at least that's how it became framed and understood.

• 7:12Tracy Alloway?

  So you mentioned commitments. What exactly were the commitments or the promises that different governments had made to their citizens? Because, you know, I think about America and obviously in the 1950s, 1960s, there was the American dream of a nice house in the suburbs and a car and 2.4 children or whatever it was. And then in the East, I think there was a promise of economic growth, but maybe the emphasis was more on equality of economic growth versus just pure economic growth.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I think, as I defined in the book, this kind of politics of making promises took different shapes in the West and the East. The West had more abundance from the start, and certainly creating abundance was at the core of what democratic capitalism was all about. But it wasn't particularly because the West was in this Cold War, you couldn't just be about creating abundance. There had to be some sense of limiting inequality at the very least. And so, Western states, not universally and not necessarily with all of their conviction, but they supported labor unions to a much greater degree than they would subsequently. They created broad welfare states that invested in cradle-to-grave type of state intervention.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  They largely secured, for at least large segments of their population, income, security, job security, even the commitment to full employment was a kind of post-war novelty that governments could actually make credible. And in the East, it took something, you know, it was a slightly different shape, but there were similar kinds of promises made that your workday would get shorter, your even intergenerational upward mobility would increase, you had access to housing. All of these, always very incompletely fulfilled, but they were kind of making progress incredibly in the eyes of their populations, making more progress towards a future of both material abundance and some form of equality. Not full-on equality, certainly much more in

• 9:17Speaker 04

  communist or state socialist societies, equality was held in higher regard, but also very much in the West. You kind of couldn't come out just as fully comfortable with the levels of inequality that we've reached by today's standards. So, this search for both abundance and some measure of equality was there in both the West and the East.

• 9:38Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, it's funny, like, obviously, I think today, we think of the Soviet Union's economic model as sort of having been a basket case and a disaster, but for many years, they were actually, they were growing, they were industrializing, they had rapid growth. Something that I hadn't realized until I read your book, and maybe we're skipping ahead a little bit here in the story, but even like in Western financial markets, there was sort of an obsession with like Eastern Bloc debt, like it was an exciting trade to lend to some of the communist countries in the East. And like financial analysts were like really excited about these investments.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I don't know that we can really pin that necessarily on their growth prospects per se, but Western bankers definitely believe that the communist world had a nice recipe for making secure loans. So if things were to come to a crisis, it was believed that authoritarianism was going to be very good at imposing these kinds of cuts, at imposing discipline and breaking promises. And in the background, the Soviet economy itself, in the background of a country like Poland or Hungary or East Germany, the Soviet economy was sitting there, as they literally called it, an umbrella, an economic and financial umbrella over the rest of the Eastern Bloc, where if any of these countries ran into financial difficulties, it was assumed that the Soviet Union would kind of come to their financial rescue,

• 11:01Speaker 04

  would bail them out and in the end pay off their debts. And it turned out that that wasn't the case by the 1980s. But in the 1970s in particular, that was a very popular view in the Western financial press.

• 11:13Tracy Alloway?

  Explain how we got from the 1970s where Russia, you know, is kind of impressive, at least to Western investors and analysts, to the 1980s where it's unable to do what it had promised to some of its allies.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, so you know, it's largely a story of oil and natural gas. Kind of coming into the 1970s, the Soviet Union has found significant oil reserves in Western Siberia. It's started to develop those reserves over the course of the 1960s. And by the 1970s, it's coming online, so to speak, as an energy superpower at the same time that world markets are creating multiple crises that send the price of oil and natural gas through the roof. And so throughout the 1970s, it looks like the Soviet Union had, and in fact, it does have all of this energy wealth at its disposal. And then the 1980s come and the kind of fortunes reverse. So, you know, when prices go up, people start to look for more supply.

• 12:14Speaker 04

  They find energy in places like the North Sea. They start to develop much more energy supply. Western countries have done not a great job, but they've done something to create more energy efficient economies. And so the forces of supply and demand start to send the price of oil in the 1980s on a downward trend, pinpointed by a couple of particular moments like 1985, where it really significantly collapses.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  And the Soviet Union itself finds that it's much more difficult to produce the growth in its energy sector that it had produced in the 1960s and the 1970s. And so these two forces, a kind of plateau in production and the collapse in price, all of a sudden leave the Soviet Bloc as a whole, looking much less economically powerful by the, even the middle of the 1980s than it was, let's say, in the late 1970s.

• 13:09Joe Weisenthal?

  When we were talking about the intro and you sort of alluded to it when you were talking about the umbrella. And this belief in the West that, well, you know, the Soviet Union is authoritarian, centrally planned economy. They don't have to pander to voters and therefore one might think that that's a more politically conducive environment for cutting spending or making difficult decisions. I'm curious the answer, why that didn't turn out to be the case. My guess is part of the story is that, well, maybe the promises to their own citizens could be taken for granted. That these other satellite countries, East Germany, Poland, et cetera.

• 13:52Joe Weisenthal?

  They have no obligation to stick with the Eastern Bloc if they're not getting that support anymore from the Soviet Union. But why don't you sort of explain why that authoritarian ease didn't end up working out?

• 14:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it can of corresponding to this belief in the West that authoritarians would be good at breaking promises. Those same people and many others believe that democracies would be very bad at breaking promises. Because as you mentioned in the intro, right, would seem to make sense that if you're trying to get elected, it's just not in your interest to try to break promises to your own citizens. The turn of the 1980s, both events in the United States and Great Britain and events in the Eastern Bloc suggests that this might not be true. And in fact, democratic elections and the kind of legitimacy that it bestows on governments, at least that it did bestow in the past, we can talk about whether or not that's still true.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  In the 1980s, it turned out that democracy and competitive elections provided a sense of legitimacy that made the, let's say, the sales pitch of breaking promises more credible in the eyes of Western populations than it turned out to be in communist societies. So the specific case that I think is probably most illustrative is Poland in the early 1980s. People will probably know, or if they're old enough, remember the Polish Labour Union Solidarity. Its famous leader, Lech Wenzel. It's born in the summer of 1980 precisely because the Polish government tries to increase consumer prices, basically, which in communist societies was one of the foundational promises

• 15:31Speaker 04

  that had been made to the population. We will keep your basic basket of goods, the price of those goods very stable. They try to increase the prices in order to repay their debts, partially, in order to solve some of their financial problems, and people openly revolt because they don't trust that their government, that the state socialist state is essentially telling them the truth, that you need to go to the people to break these promises to get some sacrifice from them in order to repay debts. That's not a credible and legitimate claim in the eyes of Polish society. In contrast, when someone like Paul Volcker in the United States says essentially that the United States

• 16:12Speaker 04

  needs to go through a very painful recession in order to fix the problem of inflation that had come to define the United States over the course of the 1970s. Lots of people are unhappy about that. He gets death threats. There's protests. He's on the cover of Time Magazine. He's kind of public enemy number one in a sense. But it does not result in a kind of full-blown revolt against the system as it did in the Eastern Bloc. And so the legitimacy that democracy itself bestowed on Western states turns out to be the mechanism, I think, by which they were able to break promises to their people, whereas in the Eastern Bloc,

• 16:53Speaker 04

  authoritarianism proved to be very weak at this task because the only thing people had come to expect from their government, they didn't have any political role in it, the only thing they'd come to expect was some kind of material improvement year over year, meager though it was, and that was lacking in the Eastern Bloc.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  What's next for virtual assets? I'm Jacob Grease, host of Economy Scale, a series exploring growth in key global sectors. And in this episode, we're diving into the digital forces shaping finance. Shaun McHugh from Dubai-based Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has this to say.

• 17:42Speaker 05

  We're seeing a lot of institutional players come in, digital asset dedicated hedge funds, high-frequency traders and that sort of thing, and folks who service institutional clients.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  As more capital enters the market, adaptive regulation is likely to become increasingly key. Reese Merrick of Ripple says.

• 17:58Speaker 06

  A lot of regulators globally would like to keep the industry at arm's length. That's the opposite here. I think also what you'll find is that regulation and frameworks can come out, but some of them are maybe a slight iteration on some 80-year-old policy and not actually in line with what the technology can do and offer. And again, that's very different in Dubai.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. This series is brought to you by Bloomberg Media Studios and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute, brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Businessweek's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting

• 19:09Speaker 01

  and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads. That candidates quote must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed. One major perk for all that hard work employees access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 19:50Tracy Alloway?

  Can you say more about this, maybe in the context of Ronald Reagan? Because I think that would be a good example of, I guess, the role of free elections and competition between political candidates in basically letting the population like, let some of their frustration out, right? It's kind of like, okay, the current politicians have failed to keep their promise. And so we are willing to try anything, even if it means short term pain, in order to get what we want again.

• 20:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Reagan is a kind of quintessential figure for this turn. He's not a political outsider necessarily, certainly on the level of Trump in the 1970s. But he does come to DC, wins the 1980 election with a distinctly different message, right? He famously says in his inaugural address in 1981, government is not the solution to the problem. It is the problem. And that kind of message, which is already one that is then conducive to breaking promises, because it's redefined the state as the problem itself. The popular mandate that he has by winning the 1980 election in turn gives him,

• 21:08Speaker 04

  I guess the term would be more political capital and certainly more receptivity, even from his enemies or from his political enemies to accept the policies that he then enacts. Right? So I think that's one of the key factors is, yes, he has certain people who agree with it, many people who agree with him. But even those who disagree with him work within the bounds of the system where they accept, again, this is where it gets a little different in the recent years. They accept the outcome of the election, right? They view the process itself by which this was decided as legitimate. And so he's not particularly successful and he and his team are not particularly successful in cutting spending in particular and in breaking promises.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  Much more of that in the US case comes from the Federal Reserve. But he dramatically alters the rhetorical landscape of the United States and does so by bringing this movement from outside Washington DC and redefining what the kind of terms of the debate will be in the 1980s.

• 22:12Joe Weisenthal?

  You make a compelling argument that at least, you know, 40 something years ago, that something about the democratic system was more conducive to cutting spending. But a, you know, a lot of these sort of austerity that was imposed in the US came more from the Fed rather than actual spending cuts. And of course, we know that deficits actually widened quite a bit. So it sort of relied on the fact that we sort of have this sort of outside of government, undemocratic enforcer in the form of the Federal Reserve. But then also the UK example, which as your book lays out, you know, there was fights with the coal miners and maybe you can explain that.

• 22:54Joe Weisenthal?

  But it like ultimately what allowed Margaret Thatcher to have the political capital to cut was the Falkland Islands War in 1982, which gave her a burst in popularity, which, okay, maybe that allowed for some breaking promises. But sort of a, I don't know, Deus ex machina, like, does not sound like a great triumph of like, oh, this is the democratic process working smoothly with the mandate.

• 23:21Speaker 04

  No, and I don't think it's ever a, let's say, clean and easy process. And Reagan was one of those elected, I guess with that most in his mandate, Thatcher, another one. And even those who were elected with spending cuts as part of their mandate found it a very difficult thing to actually enact. So in Thatcher's case, yes, cutting spending is an important part of what she does. They also have a whole series of state-owned industries. industries that they're trying to either close down or privatize and the coal miners of Great Britain are the ones who ultimately try to fight back against this. And Thatcher, I argue, I think partially because of the kind of legitimacy that democracy bestows upon her,

• 24:04Speaker 04

  doesn't end up with British society in full revolt against her, right? So I compare in the book, the course of the miners' strike in Great Britain versus the course of solidarity in Poland. Solidarity starts as a strike among workers and builds out into a kind of society-wide revolt against the state socialist system. Whereas the miners in the UK, for a series of contingent, but also I think structural reasons, they are unable to form a broader coalition that would ultimately thwart Thatcher's action. And so the strike fails ultimately, the coal industry in the UK declines throughout the 1980s. And I think it is the kind of democratic

• 24:47Speaker 04

  system, the legitimacy of the system itself, that allows this process to unfold. So for instance, Thatcher in this period is a very divisive figure. Her approval ratings are something in the range of forty five percent. But the police, who are kind of carrying out her actions and doing the actual work to break up the miners' strike, have an approval rating somewhere in the ninety two, ninety three percent range. So the state itself is deemed to be legitimate, even if the politician who is enacting these policies is still a highly divisive figure. And that's the kind of deep legitimacy that democratic states had in this period.

• 25:30Speaker 04

  And that state socialist countries did not have, I think, is what ultimately produced the break or allowed the process of breaking promises to go ahead in the United States and the Western world more broadly.

• 25:43Tracy Alloway?

  The sort of distinction between politics and the economy, I guess?

• 25:47Speaker 04

  Well, that's a whole nother, yes, I mean, that's another way by which states, particularly capitalist states, have found ways to break promises is to shift responsibility for social and economic outcomes from the government itself to the market, right? So even processes of privatization, although technically a change in ownership were also the kind of consequences of those were often downsizing, unemployment, things like that, right? So you've shifted responsibility over to the marketplace, over to this realm called the economy. And then the negative social consequences that stem from that process of privatization

• 26:28Speaker 04

  appear to be the product of the market, they appear to be the product of the economy rather than a political decision itself. And so that distinction, yeah, the politics versus economy distinction is a fundamentally important one for how and why capitalist societies work.

• 26:45Tracy Alloway?

  So Gorbachev has a famous quote, I think it's something like, "Politics always follows the economy, not vice versa." And you actually, you mentioned that in your book, but I'd be curious to get your take about the relationship between politics and the economy and which one has the most influence on the other.

• 27:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I've wrestled with this for quite a long time as I was writing this book. And I don't think I have a categorical answer. I think it can be different things in different moments. Generally speaking, I do think that political economy, the kind of economic forces of our world and of the late 20th century, did provide, let's say, windows of opening, windows of possibility and, and also closed other possibilities in the realm of politics. So if you take something like supply-side economics in the United States, on its face in terms of whether or not it actually could have succeeded on its own terms, the idea that you cut taxes, you'll unleash economic growth and it will essentially pay for itself,

• 27:50Speaker 04

  that idea has continuously been disproven and yet it continues to exist in US political discourse largely because the United States has been able to borrow more money than anyone from the 1980s onwards thought possible. And so I think political ideas and political formations, political movements, their lifespan and their popularity and then their moments of coming to an end. Do kind of have an economic underpinning that makes them possible or not?

• 28:20Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, I'm curious, this book came out, I think, 2022 during the peak of the recent inflation wave. When you wrote it, I mean, I imagine, you know, this is years and years of research in your career, but how much were you thinking about the present day? And I recognize you keep sort of hinting at, well, maybe democratic governments in the West don't have the same perceived legitimacy to do unpopular things or to do things at all. But I'm curious, like, as you were writing, how much you were thinking about, like, this is a lesson for contemporary times?

• 28:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was part of it, certainly as the book came out. So when did the Fed start hiking? You two would probably know better. Was that the?

• 29:03Joe Weisenthal?

  First hike was in March 2022.

• 29:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it was about to come out. And I think had that happened much more as I was writing it and researching it, I think the book may have taken a different shape. Basically, it took on a new kind of resonance as the book was about to come out. As I was crafting it, it wasn't so much, I guess, the present day analogy, the present day comparison I was making was how the United States was able to exist with a system of political economy that didn't seem to me to be sustainable. In the sense of everything I had thought I learned about economics, and I was not a PhD in economics or anything, but four decades

• 29:46Speaker 04

  of current accounts deficits and budget deficits, many times had been, it had been predicted that this type of system, this type of arrangement could not go on and would one day come to an end. And yet, all of those predictions have continuously been pushed back or been, to this point, haven't come to fruition. And so I was trying to find the origins, in one way of, at least for the part about the United States in the book, trying to find the origins of where that political economic arrangement came from. And it turned out to have its origins, at least, I think, in the early 1980s with the combination of Volcker and Reagan. So, yeah, I didn't go in search of a kind of recipe of how do you go about

• 30:29Speaker 04

  breaking promises? Because I ultimately don't think the contemporary world is. One where more breaking promises is a solution to anything, but more how the United States as a political economic system arrived at the arrangement that it has had for the past four decades.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Masser. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices, but

• 31:44Speaker 01

  according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 32:23Tracy Alloway?

  This reminds me, actually, I wanted to ask you about the actual research process of writing a book like this, because I read on the back that you did a bunch of new archival research. What was that like? What did you find?

• 32:37Speaker 04

  Well, it was fascinating at every turn. So I started in Washington DC. I went to, spent a year in East German archives, which I think are the best kind of archives you can have because there's no more state left to defend its secrets. And then spent a summer in Russia as well before the war in Ukraine. Or at least the 2022 next step of the war in Ukraine. So at every turn, right, I started with a view of the Cold War. I began this project once I learned that when the Berlin Wall came down, the Eastern Bloc was $90 billion in debt to the West. And that didn't make any sense to me. It didn't seem to accord with our understanding of what the Cold War was, at least from an economic point of view, where these two sides were supposed to be

• 33:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 33:20Speaker 04

  relatively independent of each other. And then, once you get into the archives, whether it's in DC at the IMF, whether it's in Berlin at the East German Archives or in Moscow, there was an entire story there of officials on both sides of the Iron Curtain. I don't, I don't think the word is too strong, literally obsessed with questions of international finance and energy and questions of how do you go about legitimizing austerity or breaking promises to your own population. And so it was a, an exhilarating experience, at least for a historically minded person like me, to find this story in archives, you know, all over North America and Europe, at least.

• 34:03Joe Weisenthal?

  Going back to the Soviet Union for a second. So obviously, we could do 100 episodes of the podcast and never arrive at a definitive answer of why the Soviet Union collapsed and everyone has their various theories. The Berlin Wall comes down in 1989. What promises did the Soviet Union ultimately have to break? And how did those go down? What were the specific sort of decisions made out of Moscow to the satellites, to the domestic citizenry that they actually had to bite the bullet? And how did that contribute to the ultimate collapse of the whole project?

• 34:37Speaker 04

  So the international promise, I think promise is, you know, one word for it, but in a sense that they're kind of dictating to their paternal allies. But certainly promising to the socialists, the state socialists in their allied countries, that they will come to their defense, right? So if there's ever a kind of domestic revolt or a movement for domestic reform, this had happened in 1953, in 1956, the Prague Spring in 1968, almost to a certain degree in Poland in 1980 and 81. The Soviet Union was always standing there in the background, either literally intervening militarily or threatening to intervene

• 35:19Speaker 04

  to, in their frame of reference, save state socialism, save socialism from its capitalist enemy. That kind of gets encased in this idea of the Brezhnev doctrine, named after Leonid Brezhnev, that the Soviet Union will always intervene to save its allies from domestic unrest or counter-revolution. That promise gets broken in the late 1980s as Gorbachev and many, many others beyond him end up viewing their imperial relationship as a bad economic deal. So they're subsidizing their satellites in all kinds of ways, but particularly with low-cost energy, and they're not getting, in their view, anything in return, or certainly not getting a fair deal in that alliance relationship.

• 36:04Speaker 04

  And so he eventually says, essentially, you handle your own problems, we'll handle our problems. I place that moment in 1986. And within a couple of years, of course, they're testing the limits. And in 1989, the Iron Curtain comes down and the Berlin Wall collapses. Domestically, the Soviet economy, at least there's a kind of Soviet social contract that the state will provide, right? In exchange for your political silence, the state will provide you with low-cost consumer basics, job security, right? There's no unemployment in this society, at least no official unemployment. So you're going to get kind of a lower level, but certainly socioeconomic security in exchange for your political silence.

• 36:49Speaker 04

  And that, he too, also through Perestroika, tries to start to break those promises, introduce more market mechanisms, even eventually coming to the idea that there would need to be unemployment and more job insecurity in Soviet society.

• 37:05Tracy Alloway?

  I know your book stops with the end of the Soviet Union, but can you maybe give us a little bit of color on how the market opening played out among people? And I'm thinking specifically about price increases, right? So the social contract for such a long time is, as you said, you'll have subsidized energy and low-cost basic goods and a job. And then suddenly, all of that becomes very uncertain. What happened and what was the sort of response from society?

• 37:35Speaker 04

  So it plays out slightly differently in each place, of course, but a place like Poland, for instance, very quickly introduces shock therapy, as it was even called by its proponents in the fall of 1989. Essentially, the question on everyone's mind was, if we see that there's this, they hoped, very short period, maybe six, eight months, maybe a year of economic difficulty that we have to go through as we enter into the market, then we might as well get it done as quickly as we can. That was the shock therapist's message. It was also, they were fully aware that this was going to be extremely unpopular. Breaking promises is never popular. So again, better to do it quickly while everyone is kind of

• 38:20Speaker 04

  in this euphoric moment of having defeated communism or moved past their communist systems. We should use this time to do as much economic transformation as we possibly can. And so in many of these countries, there are periods of wrenching economic change, dramatic price increases. Unemployment goes up at a slower rate than people had been anticipating, largely because companies kind of take their employees' livelihoods, luckily, much more to heart than standard market models had been predicting. So there was not as much unemployment as people anticipated, but still a great deal, a great deal of industrial restructuring, deindustrialization, things like that.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  And the question, a much broader question that I think is something for, open for historical research, is how that all of that process could have been done much more Productively, let's say that maybe some promises had to be broken in some kind of way, right? I think there is something about industrial restructuring that is going to be painful. And if you think that entering the global market is ultimately a good thing on some kind of terms, there may be some kind of broken promise within that. But how to do it in a way that is most humane, most pro-growth? Because economic growth often didn't appear in these places for quite a long time.

• 39:47Speaker 04

  I think that's something that we'll need to focus on as historians for quite a long time to see where the better routes may have been passed over.

• 39:56Joe Weisenthal?

  Fritz Bartel, fascinating conversation, very timely. Thank you so much for coming on Outlots.

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Thanks so much.

• 40:15Joe Weisenthal?

  So Tracy, my takeaway is that cutting spending, breaking promises is extremely hard. And even if you have very popular, incredibly talented politicians, you still might have a hard time doing it. But maybe sometimes if the government enjoys a high degree of public credibility across the aisle, maybe sometimes it's possible without destroying society.

• 40:39Tracy Alloway?

  Public credibility and I guess ironically, democracy.

• 40:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, at least in that specific period of time.

• 40:45Tracy Alloway?

  But I do think this is sort of like, it's a funny one because we're used to thinking of humans as very short-termist.

• 40:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 40:53Tracy Alloway?

  And yet, you know, people are voting for short-term pain in order to have longer-term gains. But I think there's still an element of short-termism at play in the sense that like, it's a pendulum swinging, right? So like, you go from one candidate or one system that failed to deliver what you wanted, and then you just swing to the other one in the hopes that they're able to do it. And again, in the US at least, there's only two systems. So you get that pendulum swinging quite a lot.

• 41:23Joe Weisenthal?

  I don't know, listening to that conversation, again, I don't have an opinion on what the optimal size of government spending or the optimal size of the deficit. It's hard for me to imagine a meaningful change in the spending or deficit trajectory under the current political environment in the US. You know what I thought was the, maybe one of the most interesting points, this idea that when Margaret Thatcher, she didn't have high approval rating, but the police that ultimately had to sort of carry out actions against the coal miners, they had very high approval rating. So this idea that like, the politician may not be popular, but the state apparatus still enjoys a lot

• 42:06Joe Weisenthal?

  of credibility. And this distinction between the politician and the state apparatus, a distinction that didn't exist in the Soviet Union, that that was really the key to at least making it so that once the thing has been carried out, it doesn't like destroy society.

• 42:20Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, I think this is exactly it. So in communist systems, the state is mixed with everything, right? Like, including the economy. So you don't get that political economic distinction. Whereas in the West, that exists, it's a useful thing for politicians to blame and, you know, manipulate to their own ends.

• 42:41Joe Weisenthal?

  I guess the question, well, we know that the politics is very divisive in this country. I also worry that like this, you know, the state itself and the legitimacy of like government is coming under fire. So some difficult challenges if we, if we're going to go down that path.

• 42:57Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah. Shall we leave it there?

• 42:58Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 42:59Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

• 43:06Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our guest Fritz Bartel. He's at Fritz underscore Bartel and check out his book, The Triumph of Broken Promises. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Armin, Dashell Bennett, and Dashbot, and Kale Brooks, at Kale Brooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots. We have transcripts, a blog, and a newsletter. And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 43:34Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk about historical examples of governments cutting costs, then please leave us a Positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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