595. Why Don't We Have Better Candidates for President? | Freakonomics Radio

American politics is trapped in a duopoly, with two all-powerful parties colluding to stifle competition. We revisit a 2018 episode to explain how the political industry works, and talk to a reformer (and former presidential candidate) who is pushing for change. FOLLOW FREAKONOMICS RADIO: YouTube: https://freak.ws/3yIl6dl Apple Podcasts: https://freak.ws/3yAvQh0 Spotify: https://freak.ws/3TsdCmV ABOUT FREAKONOMICS RADIO: Discover the hidden side of everything with host Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers to uncover things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to the future of education, from markets for marriage to the surprising utility of wolves. ABOUT THE FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK: Freakonomics began as a book, which led to a blog, a documentary film, more books, a pair of pants, and in 2010, a podcast called Freakonomics Radio. Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner, it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world, with a reputation for storytelling that is both rigorous and entertaining. Its archive of more than 500 episodes is available, for free, on any podcast app, and the show airs weekly on NPR stations. Freakonomics Radio is now the flagship show of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which includes the podcasts No Stupid Questions, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS: Freakonomics Radio: https://freakonomics.com/series/freakonomics-radio/ No Stupid Questions: https://freakonomics.com/series/nsq/ People I (Mostly) Admire: https://freakonomics.com/series/people-i-mostly-admire/ The Economics of Everyday Things: https://freakonomics.com/series/everyday-things/ Special series: https://freakonomics.com/topics/ CONNECT WITH US: [email protected] https://twitter.com/freakonomics https://www.instagram.com/freakonomics/ https://www.facebook.com/freakonomics/ https://www.tiktok.com/@freakonomicsradio https://www.linkedin.com/company/freakonomics-media Subscribe to our newsletter: http://eepurl.com/bKm0cf

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you saw the recent presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, you may have found yourself thinking, really? These are the two best candidates the United States has to offer? How did that happen? The episode you're about to hear can help explain how that happened. The core of this episode was first published in 2018 during Donald Trump's presidency. This is an update, but we've also added a new voice. Andrew, it's Stephen. How are you?

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Hey, Stephen. How are you, my friend?

• 0:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  First of all, just introduce yourself, please.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  I am Andrew Yang. I'm an all-around interesting bon vivant.

• 0:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Andrew Yang has been on this show before. The first time was in early 2019 in an episode we called, Why Is This Man Running For President? Yang did run as a Democrat in the 2020 election, and for a time, he was everyone's favorite entrepreneur, a businessman with a taste for policy research. He offered sharp diagnoses and prescriptions for some of our country's biggest economic and social problems. In support, there arose a substantial Yang gang, and his campaign caught fire for a while. He made the big Democratic debate stage in 2020, but ultimately, he flamed out. In 2021, he ran for mayor of New York City.

• 1:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  He lost that election, too. Soon after, he left the Democratic Party and launched what is called the Forward Party. Why?

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Imagine if you had a business, a restaurant, eight out of 10 of your customers were unhappy, and then you proceeded to change absolutely nothing for years at a time. That's the way most Americans interact with our political system.

• 1:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. So you recently gave this TED Talk called, Why US Politics Is Broken and How to Fix It. Can you give me the TLDR on that?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Sure thing. Why are we so ticked off all the time? A lot of us are, at least. And I tried to make the case in numbers. There's a 15% approval rating for US Congress to And a 94% reelect rate for incumbent house members. So the fiction we've been sold is our leaders have to make 51% of us happy to stay in office. That's actually not true for nine out of 10 seats. The real job of members is to stay on the good side of their party's base voters. And if they win their primary, they cruise, but all of their attention and energy is on making sure they win the primary.

• 2:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is it fair to overall call that setup a duopoly?

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, of course. It's fair to call it a duopoly where the two parties have carved up the country into blue zones and red zones. And it's very hard for certainly anyone else to run and win in the vast majority of locations.

• 2:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what other duopolies does our political duopoly remind you of?

• 2:56Speaker 01

  You know, the first thing that popped into mind for me was something like Microsoft and Apple. I don't know if there are others that pop into people's minds.

• 3:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Pepsi and Coke, maybe?

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Pepsi and Coke, sure.

• 3:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Boeing and Airbus?

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely.

• 3:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Visa, Mastercard?

• 3:09Speaker 01

  The Discover fans would agree.

• 3:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, the episode you are about to hear is called America's Hidden Duopoly, first published, as I mentioned, several years ago. We've updated facts and figures as necessary, but things being what they are, there wasn't all that much updating needed. What is new is a conversation later on with Andrew Yang about what could and should be done. I think this is one of the most important episodes we've ever made, and that is reflected in the amount of correspondence we still get about this topic. And that's why we thought this episode was due for an update. As always, thanks for listening.

• 3:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Imagine a gigantic industry that's being dominated by just one or two companies. Actually, you don't have to imagine. Google has more than 90% of the global search engine market. So not quite a monopoly, but pretty close. Such cases are rare, but not so rare is the duopoly, when two firms dominate an industry, like Intel and AMD and computer processors, Boeing and Airbus and jet airliners, the sharks and the jets, and the fictional gangs from the 50s industry. But surely, the most famous duopoly is this one.

• 4:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  The rivalry between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola goes back to the 19th century. Coke was long dominant, but in the 1970s and 80s Pepsi gained ground and marketed hard to younger consumers.

• 5:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coke's internal research found that most people, even Coke employees, preferred Pepsi. In 1985, they abandoned their classic recipe in favor of New Coke, which tasted more like Pepsi. This did not work out so well.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  I'm Don Keough, president of the Coca-Cola Company. When we brought you the new taste of Coke, we knew that millions would prefer it, and millions do. What we didn't know was how many thousands of you would phone and write asking us to bring back the classic taste of original Coca-Cola.

• 5:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coke eventually got rid of New Coke altogether. And despite the flip-flop, or maybe because of it and the attendant free media, in any case Coke regained the top spot. Today, even as soda consumption falls, the rivalry rages on with both companies adding juices, teas, and waters to their portfolios. You can afford to make those big acquisitions when you've got a ton of cash on hand, when you're one of just two companies sharing a huge market. And there's another advantage to being half of a duopoly: self-perpetuation. This was covered pretty extensively in the media during the so-called Cola Wars.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  The "war" is good for both of them.

• 6:19Speaker 04

  I believe that Coke and Pepsi together, this Cola War they've been in for decades now, actually help each other sell an awful lot of product.

• 6:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  There are plenty of reasons why duopolies exist, and they're not necessarily all sinister. And capitalism scale is really important. There are all sorts of advantages to being big, which leads big companies to get even bigger, gobbling up smaller companies and essentially dictating the rules of their market. Not everyone likes this trend. In many quarters, there's a strong appetite for a smaller scale, for mom and pop and Indian artisanal. But let's be honest. That smaller scale idea is cute, but it's not winning. What's winning is dominance. Entire industries dominated by just a couple behemoths. We've already given you a few examples

• 7:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  from a variety of industries, but there's another duopoly, a mighty one, that you probably don't even think about as an industry. Which duopoly am I talking about? I'll give you some clues. Let's go back over what we just discussed about duopolies. They're big institutions that take advantage of their size to get even bigger.

• 7:35Speaker 05

  I'm talking to consultants on both sides, many of whom have been doing this for a long time, and they've never seen this amount of money.

• 7:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  As we said, not everyone likes this trend, but the opposition is not winning.

• 7:49Speaker 06

  I'd like to see more competition. You know, competition makes a better product.

• 7:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  And this leaves an entire industry run by just two behemoths.

• 7:58Speaker 07

  Ladies and gentlemen, my mother, my hero, and our next president. I could not be more proud tonight to present to you and to all of America, my father and our next president, Hillary Clinton. Donald J. Trump.

• 8:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Does it surprise you to hear our political system characterized as an industry?

• 8:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  It surprised this guy.

• 8:27Speaker 08

  Absolutely never thought of it in those terms.

• 8:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that's Michael Porter, the world famous business strategist.

• 8:33Speaker 08

  And at the core of it is what we call the duopoly.

• 8:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Comparing our political system to something like Coke and Pepsi? That can't be right, can it? No, Porter says, it's worse than that. Coke and Pepsi don't control their market nearly as fully as the Republicans and Democrats do.

• 8:50Speaker 08

  Even in soft drinks, we have a lot of new competitors. Even though Coke and Pepsi are so big, they don't truly dominate.

• 8:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Indeed, Coke and Pepsi only control about 70% of the soft drink market. At least they've got the Dr. Pepper Snapple alliance to worry about. Whereas Republicans and Democrats? You can take all the libertarians and independents, the Green Party, Working Families Party, the American Delta Party, the United States Pirate Party, which is a real thing. You add them all together and they're not even close to Dr. Pepper. And yet, from both Republicans and Democrats in Washington, we've been hearing the same complaint for decades now.

• 9:33Speaker 09

  Washington is totally broken.

• 9:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Washington is broken.

• 9:37Speaker 09

  This system is broken. It's not working. Washington is not working.

• 9:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mr. Speaker, Washington is broken. But what if the Washington is broken idea is just a line?

• 9:50Speaker 10

  I like to teach the world to sing.

• 9:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Maybe it's even a slogan that the industry approves.

• 9:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah. What if they're just selling and we're buying? What if it's not broken at all?

• 10:05Speaker 11

  The core idea here is that Washington isn't broken. In fact, it turns out that Washington is doing exactly what it's designed to do.

• 10:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today on Freakonomics Radio, is Washington really an industry just like any other? How'd it get that way? And what's it mean? And when the duopoly wins, does that mean the rest of us lose?

• 10:44Speaker 12

  This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 11:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Once upon a time, there was a dairy products company in Wisconsin called Gail Foods, G-E-H-L.

• 11:07Speaker 11

  My name is Catherine Gail.

• 11:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Catherine Gail was the CEO of the company. It had been founded well over a century earlier by her great-grandfather. For years, Gail Foods sold the standard dairy items: butter, milk, ice cream. In the 1960s, they got into pudding and cheese sauces. And more recently, Gail Foods kept keeping up with the times.

• 11:28Speaker 11

  High-tech food manufacturing.

• 11:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Meaning low-acid, aseptic processing and packaging using robots, which creates shelf-stable foods without the use of preservatives. The process is also useful for products like weight-loss shakes and iced coffee drinks. Under Catherine Gail, Gail Foods had more than 300 employees and was doing nearly $250 million a year in sales, but there were a lot of challenges. Why? Because the food industry is incredibly competitive. There are new competitors all the time, also new technologies, new consumer preferences. So to plot a path forward, Gail turned to one of the most acclaimed consultants in the world.

• 12:12Speaker 08

  I'm Michael Porter. I'm a professor at Harvard Business School, and I work most of the time on strategy and competitiveness.

• 12:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Porter is now in his late 70s. As an undergraduate, he studied aerospace and mechanical engineering. Then he got an MBA and a PhD in business economics. So he understands systems as well as how things are made within those systems. He's written landmark books called Competitive Strategy and On Competition. He is cited more than any other scholar in the field. He's best known for creating a popular framework for analyzing the competitiveness of different industries.

• 12:51Speaker 08

  The framework that I introduced many years ago says that there's these five forces.

• 12:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  These five forces help determine just how competitive a given industry is. The five forces are the threat of new entrants, the threat of substitute products or services, the bargaining power of suppliers, the bargaining power of buyers, and rivalry among existing competitors. We're not there yet, but if you want to jump ahead and consider how these forces apply to our political system, I'm going to say them again. The threat of new entrants, the threat of substitute products or services, the bargaining power of suppliers, bargaining power of buyers, and rivalry among existing competitors. Anyway, you can see why someone like Catherine Gale, the CEO of a century-old food company,

• 13:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  might want to bring in someone like Michael Porter to figure out what to do next.

• 13:44Speaker 11

  It was a classic business strategy exercise.

• 13:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now Gale, in addition to her family business, had another abiding interest: politics.

• 13:54Speaker 11

  Yes, I've certainly moved around in the partisan classification.

• 14:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  During high school, she was a Republican. Over time, she drifted left.

• 14:04Speaker 11

  My daughter, actually, when she was six, came to me and said, Mommy, I think I'm a DePublican, or maybe a Remocrat. And I think that gives a good sense of where things are at in our household.

• 14:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  In 2007, Gale joined the National Finance Committee of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. She became one of his top fundraisers. Couple of years after Obama was elected, Gale joined the board of a government organization called the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which helps US firms do business in emerging markets.

• 14:37Speaker 11

  And... Well, I was paying a lot of attention to what was happening in Washington DC.

• 14:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  And Gail did not like what she saw in Washington DC. She didn't like it one bit.

• 14:47Speaker 11

  It became really clear to me that this fight was not about solving problems for American people. This fight was about one party beating the other party and that the parties were more committed to that than to actually solving problems or creating opportunities. Eventually, I understood that it didn't matter who we elected. It didn't matter the quality of the candidates. And so, once it became clear to me that it was a systems problem, I switched from investing my time in searching for the next great candidate and turned an eye to the fundamental root cause structures in the political system

• 15:31Speaker 11

  that pretty much guarantee that as voters, we are perpetually dissatisfied.

• 15:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  So she started raising money for nonpartisan organizations working toward political reform.

• 15:42Speaker 11

  And one of the things that became clear is that there was no thesis for investment in political reform and innovation.

• 15:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  In other words, people didn't want to give money to nonpartisan organizations working toward political reform. They only wanted to give money to political parties and their candidates. In fact, Catherine Gail found that potential donors had a hard time believing that such a thing as nonpartisan political reform even existed. That's how conditioned they were to seeing the political system through a two-party lens. It was around this time that Catherine Gail began meeting with Michael Porter. She had brought him in to Gail Foods to help figure out the company's strategy going forward, keeping in mind his five famous forces about industry competitiveness: new rivals, existing rivalries, substitute products, supplier power, and customer power.

• 16:34Speaker 11

  I would consistently make the case to Michael that, wow, how we're analyzing this industry of low-acidaseptic food production, which is the business I was in, all of these tools are directly applicable to analyzing the business of politics.

• 16:51Speaker 08

  And frankly, I knew almost nothing about politics. But the more I heard and the more we talked, the more it became clear that we really needed to take a fresh look here.

• 17:00Speaker 11

  And so, it was out of that crucible of...

• 17:05Speaker 11

  Analyzing a traditional business strategy and at the same time devoting so much time to political reform and innovation, that it became clear that politics was an industry, the industry was thriving, and that all of the tools of conventional business analysis were applicable here.

• 17:22Speaker 08

  And that's where looking at this as an industry starts to provide some power.

• 17:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so you came to the conclusion that politics is an industry much like many of the other industries that you've been studying over your career. You never really thought of it in those terms before?

• 17:41Speaker 08

  Absolutely never thought of it in those terms. We always thought of politics as a public institution, that the rules were somehow codified in the rule of law and in our constitution. But what we came to see is that politics is really about competition between largely private actors. And at the core of it is what we call the duopoly.

• 18:04Speaker 11

  The duopoly, Republicans and Democrats.

• 18:07Speaker 08

  And that competition has been structured around a set of practices and rules, and in some cases, policies, that had been created over time, largely by the actors themselves. Actually, the founders left a lot of room in terms of how the actual plumbing would work. But it was interesting, multiple of our founders actually expressed a deep fear that parties would take over.

• 18:41Speaker 11

  John Adams said at one point, "There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader and concerting measures in opposition to each other." And if you take a look at Washington's farewell address, which he wrote in 1796, he talks about dangers which could come in front of the republic in the future. And he specifically focuses on two. One is foreign influence, and the other is partisanship. The other danger is the formation of strong parties.

• 19:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Having come to the conclusion that the political system operated more like a traditional industry than a public institution, Catherine Gale and Michael Porter set down their ideas in a Harvard Business School report. It's called "Why Competition in the Politics Industry Is Failing America." When you read the paper, right there, under "Key Findings," is this sentence in bright red print: "The political system isn't broken, it's doing what it is designed to do."

• 19:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  In other words, it was no coincidence that politics had become self-sustaining, self-dealing, and self-centered. They were the blue team and the red team, kind of like Pepsi and Coke.

• 20:01Speaker 11

  Essentially, they divided up an entire industry into two sides.

• 20:06Speaker 08

  We ended up seeing that it wasn't just the parties competing, it's that they had created influence and, in a sense, captured the other actors in the industry.

• 20:19Speaker 11

  You have media, and political consultants, and lobbyists, and candidates, and policies, all divided onto one of two sides.

• 20:31Speaker 08

  What you see is the system has been optimized over time.

• 20:35Speaker 11

  For the benefit of private gains-seeking organizations, our two political parties and their industry allies, what we together call the political-industrial complex.

• 20:46Speaker 08

  This industry has made it very, very hard to play at all if you're not playing their game.

• 20:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  How does the political industry compare in size and scope, dollars, employees, direct and indirect, penetration and influence, to other industries that you've studied? Pharmaceutical industry, auto industry, and so on?

• 21:08Speaker 08

  It's a great question, and we have done enormous amounts of work on it. It turns out to be very difficult to get what I would call a completely comprehensive answer. We estimate that in the most recent two-year election cycle, the industry's total revenue was approximately $16 billion. This is not the biggest industry in the economy, but it's substantial.

• 21:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  It would be one thing if this large industry were delivering value to its customers, who are supposed to be us, the citizenry. But Gail and Porter argue that the political industry is much better at generating revenue for itself and creating jobs for itself while treating its customers with something closer to disdain. Think about cable TV on steroids. And the numbers back up their argument. Customers' satisfaction with the political industry is at historic lows. Just 16% of Americans currently say they trust the federal government. In terms of popularity, it ranks below every private industry.

• 22:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  That includes the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, the airline industry, and, yes, cable TV.

• 22:25Speaker 11

  Generally, in industries where customers are not happy and yet the players in the industry are doing well, you'll see a new entrant. You'll see a new company come into business to serve those customers.

• 22:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  A new company like Netflix, or Hulu, or Amazon Prime, or Sling TV, or, well, you get the point.

• 22:47Speaker 08

  So in today's world, we have the majority of voters say in polls that they would rather have an independent. So in a normal industry, you'd have a whole new competitor coming up that was about independence, you know, to serve that unmet need.

• 23:01Speaker 11

  And yet, in politics, we don't see any new entrants. So why is that? Well, it turns out that our political parties work well together in one particular area. And that is actually colluding together over time behind the scenes to create rules and practices that essentially erect barriers to entry, ways to keep out new competition.

• 23:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  In their report, Gail and Porter identify the five key inputs to modern political competition: candidates, campaign talent, voter data, idea suppliers, and lobbyists. Here's what they write. "Increasingly, most everything required to run a modern campaign and govern is tied to or heavily influenced by one party or the other, including think tanks, voter data, and talent."

• 23:58Speaker 08

  What's happened is the parties have now divided up. The key inputs to political competition. And if you're not a Republican or a Democrat, then you're in trouble in even finding a campaign manager, much less getting the best up-to-date voter data and the best analytics and so forth.

• 24:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's not enough to monopolize the campaign machinery. Gale and Porter argue that the political industry has essentially co-opted the media, which spreads their messages for free.

• 24:27Speaker 09

  ...to the president. This helps Donald Trump tonight. This is a big, big beginning to the end of what has been a witch hunt.

• 24:38Speaker 13

  Trump Watch, now man in the White House is behaving now like a character on that old detective show, Columbo.

• 24:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Perhaps most important, the two parties rig the election system against would-be disruptors. The rules they set allow for partisan primaries, gerrymandered congressional districts, and winner-take-all elections.

• 25:00Speaker 11

  Each side of the duopoly, Republicans and Democrats, and the players that are playing for those teams, have, over time, worked to improve their own side's fortunes. But collectively, they also have come together to improve the ability of the industry as a whole to protect itself from new competition, from third parties that could threaten either of the two sides of the duopoly.

• 25:34Speaker 08

  What the parties have done is they've been very, very clever. They don't compete head-to-head for the same voters. They're not competing for the middle.

• 25:45Speaker 11

  It's likely that we have a much more powerful center, a much more powerful group of moderates, than our current duopoly demonstrates.

• 26:00Speaker 08

  What they've understood is competing for the middle is a sort of destructive competition. It's kind of a zero-sum competition. So the parties have divided the voters and kind of sort of ignored the ones in the middle because they don't have to worry about them. Because if the middle voter is unhappy, which most middle voters are today in America, what can they do?

• 26:22Speaker 11

  The only thing either party has to do... To thrive, to win the next election, is to convince the public that they are just this much less hated than the one other choice that the voter has. That gives those two companies, the Democrats and the Republicans, the incentive to prioritize other customers.

• 26:47Speaker 08

  And their target customer on each side is the special interests and the partisans, and they get a lot of resources and a lot of campaign contributions and massive amounts of lobbying money to try to get their, you know, support with whatever those partisan or special interests needs are.

• 27:07Speaker 11

  There is now an entire industry of politics that moves forward independent of whether that industry actually solves problems for the American people.

• 27:20Speaker 08

  What's happened is that the barriers to getting into this industry and providing a different type of competition have been built to enormous heights, which has allowed the parties to structure the nature of the rivalry among themselves in a way that really maximizes their benefit to them as institutions, but doesn't actually serve the public interest.

• 27:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, that's depressing, isn't it? Insightful, perhaps, but depressing nonetheless. So, do Catherine Gale and Michael Porter have any bright ideas for tackling this problem?

• 28:03Speaker 11

  Yes.

• 28:03Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 28:04Speaker 11

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 08

  Oh, my god.

• 28:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's coming up, right after this.

• 28:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  The business strategist Michael Porter and the CEO-turned-political reformist Catherine Gale argue in a Harvard Business School report that our political system has been turned into an industry with no real competition. The industry's primary beneficiaries are itself and its many ancillary participants, including the media.

• 28:39Speaker 08

  But the vast majority of Americans, who are somewhere in the middle, are feeling very, very disaffected.

• 28:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  The lack of vigorous competition, they argue, has allowed the Democrats and Republicans to carve out diametrically opposed political bases, fairly narrow and extremely partisan.

• 28:56Speaker 11

  Years ago, we created partisan primaries in order to take the selection of a candidate out of this "smoke-filled back room" and give the selection of the party candidate choice to citizens. So that was designed to give more control to citizens. It turns out it has had a very deleterious effect on competition and has increased the power of the parties.

• 29:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  And the parties, Gayle and Porter argue, use those partisan bases to support the desires of the political industry's true customers and its wealthiest special interests, industries like healthcare, real estate, and financial services, also labor unions and lobbyists. In this duopolistic business model, polarization is a feature, not a bug.

• 29:44Speaker 08

  We have a chart in our report that just selects some, what we call, landmark-type legislation over the last 50, 60 years. And if you go back, you know, even 20 or 30 years ago, the landmark legislation was consensus.

• 29:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  For instance, the Social Security Act of 1935 had 90% Democratic support and 75% Republican. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had 60% Democratic support and, again, 75% Republican.

• 30:16Speaker 08

  Now, for the last decade or two, that's been the opposite pattern. The only way landmark legislation gets passed is one party has enough votes to pass that by itself.

• 30:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, was passed in 2010 with zero Republican votes in Congress. President Trump's 2018 tax reform bill, zero Democratic votes.

• 30:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  So your diagnosis suggests that this industry serves itself incredibly well. It suggests that it serves us, the citizenry, really poorly. And it also suggests that more competition would improve the industry, as it does in just about every industry. But just having more competition in parties doesn't seem to be the answer alone. I mean, there are plenty of multi-party political systems around the world that have similar cases of dysfunction and corruption and cronyism like ours. So how direct a step or direct a prescription would that be?

• 31:19Speaker 08

  I think in our system in particular, where we have only two, and they have been able to actually set up the rules of competition that reinforce their partisan competition, dividing voters and so forth, more competition, I think, would be incredibly valuable. But it has to be a different kind of competition. It can't be just another party that's going to split our electorate into three partisan groups. And so in our work, we focus on what would it take to make the competition less about dividing the voters? And how could we make the competition more around building up more choices for voters

• 32:03Speaker 08

  that were more about solutions? By the way, let me be clear, we're not against parties per se. What we are against is the nature of the competition that our existing dominant parties have created.

• 32:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  When you suggest that these rules were carefully constructed, I guess if I were thinking about something other than politics, the first thought that would come to mind then is, well, collusion, right? If I can be one member of a duopoly, I actually hate my rival much less than I hate the idea of anybody else who would interrupt that rivalry because we're splitting the spoils now. Do you have any evidence of collusion between the parties to create a system that essentially keeps the rest out?

• 32:47Speaker 08

  First of all, that is the right word. It is collusion. There's probably a legal definition of collusion, which I don't know, I'm not a lawyer, but the effect is exactly the same. The parties have agreed on a set of rules. That benefit the duopoly and preserve this nature of competition. You can really put rules into a number of buckets. There's legislative machinery, as we call it, which is how the Senate and the Congress are run. And then there's the election rules, having to do with what is the primary process like? And what does it take to get on the ballot as an independent? And the various campaign finance stuff that surrounds elections.

• 33:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Has anyone ever considered filing, whether in earnest or not, an antitrust suit against Republicans and Democrats?

• 33:36Speaker 08

  You know, Stephen, that's a great question. You know, I have. We've actually had a significant effort to see if that's feasible, what the law is, you know, looking at the antitrust statutes. But this is absolutely what antitrust policy is all about. It's creating, you know, open, effective competition that serves the customer and the public interest. And this industry cries out for that.

• 34:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right. So in the report, you discuss the many advantages the two parties have. And I think we all recognize that, you know, there's real power in size and there's leverage, especially when you're making your own rules for your own industry. And you write that they use those advantages to retain control and to constrict competition and so on. But it strikes me that Donald Trump really got around a lot of those advantages. So you write that the parties, quote, "control the inputs to modern campaigning governing." But he didn't rely on that, really. You wrote that the parties "co-opted channels for reaching voters." But he kind of co-opted or maybe took advantage of his own channels, including free media and his own social media accounts.

• 34:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  You write that the parties, quote, "erect high and rising barriers to new competition." But in the case of Trump, you know, his own party tried as hard as they could to erect the highest barrier and couldn't keep him out. And so on those fronts, it would strike me that the parties failed, failed to constrict a certain competitor. So I don't know how you personally feel about President Trump, but according to those advantages and his end run around them, it would sound as though he is at least one example of the solution to the problems that you're describing.

• 35:26Speaker 08

  Well, yeah, I think that is definitely a good question, and we must take that on. I would say a couple of things. First of all, the best choice that President Trump made was to run in a party.

• 35:40Speaker 11

  He had to pick one side of the duopoly because he knew he couldn't win as an independent. He had actually explored running as an independent in previous years, but that, in the current system, is not seen to be a winning strategy.

• 35:56Speaker 08

  The other thing I would say about him was that he had resources. In the end, he didn't have to use that many of them, but he could almost have self-financed, and he was appealing to a certain subset of the partisans, maybe a somewhat neglected subset of the people on the right. And he had a very strong existing brand identity, so he was able to get a lot of recognition and coverage without having to spend that much on advertising.

• 36:30Speaker 11

  He represents a personality-driven campaign within a party, but we don't believe that he represents fundamentally transforming the structure of competition in the industry.

• 36:44Speaker 08

  So far, Trump is just the third in a row president that may have said that he was going to do things differently and cut across lines and all that kind of stuff, but frankly, he didn't, Obama didn't, and President Bush didn't. Even though President Obama and President Bush campaigned on bipartisanship and bringing people together, they failed. So I think that those recent case studies are sobering.

• 37:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, remember, this conversation was from 2018, just to put this in context. But back to the core issue, some political scientists argue that Gale and Porter's analysis of party power has it backwards. These scholars say, "Our political system is in bad shape because the parties have gotten weaker over time." They argue that stronger parties could help beat back special interests and produce more compromise and moderation. Want some interesting evidence for this "parties are weak" argument? Think back to the 2016 presidential election. You had one national party, the Democrats, that tried as hard as it could, to the point

• 37:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  of cheating, essentially, to pre-select its candidate, Hillary Clinton, who then lost. And you had the other national party, the Republicans, try as hard as it could to keep a certain candidate off the ballot, but they failed and he won.

• 38:08Speaker 11

  It's true that the parties are not as strong as they were in the past, but both sides of the political industrial complex, Democrats and Republicans, are as strong as ever. It's just that the power may not all reside within the party.

• 38:26Speaker 08

  If parties were stronger, that doesn't mean they'd be moderating forces. That's what some people say. I really don't understand that argument. The stronger they are, the less moderating they're going to be, given the nature of the competition that's been created.

• 38:38Speaker 11

  I think we are really asking for too little when we say, let's tinker around the edges and get stronger parties so that we can have a little bit of a cleaner process.

• 38:51Speaker 08

  What we believe is we need to create structural reforms that would actually better align the election process and the legislative process with the needs of the average citizen.

• 39:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so you've diagnosed the problem in a really interesting and profound way, by overlaying a template that's more commonly applied to firms, to the political industry. And of course, it theoretically leads to a different set of solutions than we've typically been hearing. So then you discuss four major solutions. Let's go through them point by point. Number one, you talk about restructuring the election process itself. Give me some really concrete examples of what that would look like. I'd also love to hear whether you do see some evidence of these examples happening, because it does seem there has been some election reform in states and regions around the country.

• 39:43Speaker 08

  Yes, well, when we think about reform, we have to think about really two questions. Number one, is a reform powerful? Will it actually change the competition? And a lot of what people are proposing now is actually not going to make much difference. So term limits are a great example.

• 39:58Speaker 11

  We aren't fans of term limits because we think that without changing the root cause incentives, you'll actually just have different faces playing the same game.

• 40:09Speaker 08

  So number one is we have to re-engineer the election processes, the election machinery.

• 40:14Speaker 11

  And there are three electoral reforms that are important. We call it the election trifecta.

• 40:20Speaker 08

  The first, and probably the single most powerful, is to move to nonpartisan, single-ballot primaries.

• 40:27Speaker 11

  Currently, if you're going to vote in the primary, you show up and you get a Democratic ballot or a Republican ballot, and then you vote for who's going to represent that party in the general election.

• 40:39Speaker 08

  And the one that's on the farthest left or the one that's on the farthest right has a tendency to win because the people that turn out for primaries are a relatively small fraction of even the party. And those are the people that show up because, you know, they're really partisans and they really have special interests and they really, really care about getting somebody on the ballot that, you know, for them.

• 41:04Speaker 11

  In a single-ballot, nonpartisan primary, all the candidates for any office, no matter what party they're in, are on the same ballot. And we propose that the top four vote-getters advance out of that primary to the general election.

• 41:23Speaker 08

  And the reason a single primary where everybody's in it is so important is that if you want to win, you want to appeal to as many voters as you can. And therefore, you're going to get people that are not just trying to appeal to their particular extreme.

• 41:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  The second part of the Gail Porter election reform trifecta, ranked choice voting.

• 41:46Speaker 11

  Here's how ranked choice voting works. You'll now have four candidates that made it out of the top four primary. Those four candidates will all be listed on the general election ballot, and you come and vote for them in order of preference. So it's easy. This is my first choice. This candidate's my second choice. It's my third choice. This is my fourth choice. When the votes are tabulated... If no candidate has received over 50%, then whoever came in last is dropped, and votes for that candidate are then reallocated to those voters' second choice,

• 42:25Speaker 11

  and the count is run again until one candidate reaches over 50%.

• 42:32Speaker 08

  What that does is it gives a candidate a need to appeal to a broader group of voters.

• 42:39Speaker 11

  And very importantly, it eliminates one of the hugest barriers to competition in the existing system, and that is the spoiler argument. So what happens currently is that if there's, let's say, an attractive third-party candidate or an independent candidate, both Democrats and Republicans will make the argument that nobody should vote for them because they will simply draw votes away from a Democrat or draw votes away from a Republican and therefore spoil the election for one of the duopoly candidates. Once you have ranked choice voting, everybody can pick whoever they want as their first

• 43:24Speaker 11

  choice, second choice, third choice. No vote is wasted, and no vote spoils the election for another candidate.

• 43:34Speaker 08

  And then the last part of the trifecta is nonpartisan redistricting. Gerrymandering has to go.

• 43:39Speaker 11

  When parties control drawing the districts, they can draw districts that will be more likely to tilt in favor of their party, and they can end up having a disproportionate number of quote-unquote "safe" Republican seats or "safe" Democratic seats by the way that they draw the districts, and we want to make that go away.

• 44:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  In addition to election rule reforms, Porter and Gail would like to see changes to the rules around governing.

• 44:11Speaker 11

  Congress makes its own rules for how it functions. And over time, these rules, customs and practices have been set in place to give an enormous amount of power to the party that controls the chamber.

• 44:29Speaker 08

  And this is sort of collusion in a way, is when the other party takes over, they do it the same way.

• 44:34Speaker 11

  So we propose moving away from partisan control of the day-to-day legislating in Congress and also in state legislatures as well.

• 44:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  The third leg of their reform agenda is about money in politics. But their analysis led them to a different conclusion than many reformers.

• 44:56Speaker 11

  Where we differ with so many people championing these reforms is that we don't believe that money in politics is the core issue.

• 45:07Speaker 08

  The problem is really this nature of competition that leads to this partisanship. And that's not a money issue, per se. That's a structural issue.

• 45:17Speaker 11

  If you take money out of politics without changing the rules of the game, you'll simply make it cheaper for those using the existing system to get the self-interested results that they want without changing the incentives to actually deliver solutions for the American people. Having said that, we do believe that there are benefits to increasing the power of smaller donors. And so the reforms that we have suggested are primarily focused on increasing the power of smaller donors.

• 45:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  For instance, having the government itself match donations from small donors. We should note that most of the ideas Gail and Porter are presenting here are not all that novel, if you follow election reform even a little bit. Even we poked into a lot of them in an episode called "10 Ideas to Make Politics Less Rotten." I guess it's one measure of how successful and dominant the political duopoly is, that plenty of seemingly sensible people have plenty of seemingly sensible reform ideas that, for the most part, gain very little traction.

• 46:28Speaker 08

  It is definitely challenging. This is a ground game. We're not going to be able to do this in a year or one election cycle because the resources that the current duopoly have to deploy to play their game are substantial.

• 46:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Despite the rather depressing, or at least sobering, picture that you paint of the political industry, throughout the report, you express quite a bit of optimism. And I want to know why or how, because I don't see the avenue, I guess, for optimism.

• 47:02Speaker 08

  Well, you know, I do think we have a basic optimism. We have no sense that it will be easy to change the rules of this game for a whole variety of reasons. But the good news is we've had some progress. We've got some nonpartisan primary states now, including California. You know, we've got ranked choice voting in Maine. What seems to be building in America is a growing appetite and a growing recognition that this isn't working for our country. I think the younger generation are particularly outraged and concerned and open to all kinds of new ideas. But I think it's going to take time.

• 47:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. That was our 2018 episode, "America's Hidden Duopoly." Couple of updates. In 2020, Michael Porter and Catherine Gale published a book called "The Politics Industry." And Gale, in particular, is still involved in electoral reform. And Michael Porter never did file that antitrust suit. Coming up after the break, Andrew Yang's 2024 take on the duopoly and some signs of change. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

• 48:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Since we published the original episode you just heard, America's Hidden Duopoly, one of the prominent reforms embraced by Michael Porter and Catherine Gale has been spreading at least a bit. Alaska and Maine have used ranked choice voting in statewide elections. It has also been introduced in local elections, including the 2021 race in New York City to pick a new mayor. One of the candidates, Andrew Yang, was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of ranked choice voting, but it didn't seem to help him. In a competitive Democratic primary, he came in fourth. That was despite big-name recognition from his presidential run. So, there would seem to be something about Andrew

• 49:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yang, the candidate, that voters don't love. But that's fair, because there's a lot about the voting system that Andrew Yang doesn't love. So, what's he been up to lately?

• 49:27Speaker 01

  I'm co-chair of the Forward Party, the third-biggest political party in the country by resources, though there's a very steep drop-off between number two and number three.

• 49:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  What is the drop-off between number two and number three, in whatever metric you'd like to measure, whether it's people, dollars, etc.?

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Using dollars, I'd say there's probably something like a 98.5% drop-off.

• 49:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, what is the Forward Party? What are you trying to accomplish, especially in this current election cycle?

• 49:54Speaker 01

  The Forward Party is a movement of independent-minded Americans who are trying to reform our political system, so it actually responds to us and the challenges of this era. And we do that by pushing ballot reforms and backing positive candidates with any letter next to their name. So, it could be a Democrat, it could be an independent, it could be a Republican.

• 50:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is the Forward Party endorsing or backing any Republicans yet?

• 50:20Speaker 01

  We just recently announced the endorsement of a guy named John Curtis, who is running for Mitt Romney's old Senate seat, or soon-to-be-old Senate seat. There are 11 candidates in that race. Eight of them have endorsed Donald Trump. John Curtis has not endorsed Donald Trump, but actually started something called the Conservative Climate Caucus in Congress. So, he believes in climate change, shocker. But a lot of Democrats would look up and say, "Oh, he's got R next to his name, so, you know, can't get behind him." But we think that's short-sighted.

• 50:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you're not just a political person, but you're an actual business person and you understand the way the economy works, I would argue, pretty well. What are the downsides of duopoly writ large, whether it's in an economic system or a political system? Because one might say, well, maybe it makes sense because if there's too much choice, it gets baffling. And also, the bigger and more powerful you get, the more resources you have, the more you know what you're doing. So maybe we should be in favor of duopoly.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Well, in the political sphere, what's interesting, Stephen, is the vast majority of us, about 70% of Americans, live not under two-party rule, but one-party rule. It's not like Democrats are really trying to run and win in rural Missouri. It's not like Republicans are really trying to run and win in San Francisco. You have these only 5% to 10% genuine swing districts. And then the major exception to this is in the presidential. Even in the presidential, your vote won't matter, my vote won't matter. The only votes that are going to matter are based in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia. And that's something that most Americans also just sort of shrugged and said, I guess that's the way we do things.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  But the duopoly is effectively one-party rule for about two-thirds of the country.

• 52:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  So if, as you're saying, making most districts basically one-party district is the root cause of so much of this, what good would a third or fourth or fifth party do?

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Well, the goal of any independent party, if they're smart, is to try and reform the voting system so you have more true accountability and a feedback loop between people and our leaders. In Alaska, they shifted to an all-party primary where voters can vote for a candidate of any party with the top four getting through to the general and chosen via ranked choice voting. So a little-known former vice presidential nominee named Sarah Palin was on the ballot in '22. And in a customary system, she wins the Republican primary and probably wins the general because it's a red-leaning state. But in the new system, there was a general election with multiple candidates, including Of fairly innocuous state legislator named Mary Paltola,

• 53:04Speaker 01

  who is very pleasant and congenial. And a critical number of Alaskan voters placed Mary Paltola as their second choice, thus edging out Sarah Palin. And if Sarah Palin was back in DC, we'd all be subject to clips of her saying something crazy every week because there'd be a TV camera in her face every week. And we were spared that because they changed the voting system in Alaska. In the Senate race in that same cycle in 22, Lisa Murkowski was up for reelection. She voted to impeach Donald Trump, which is a no-no. It makes you run afoul of the base. Eight out of 10 of the Republican House members who made the same choice did not make it back to the primaries.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  But Lisa Murkowski made it back because, again, Alaska essentially replaced their Republican primary with an all-party primary. And so Lisa Murkowski was able to get through in the general election because a critical number of Alaskan voters ranked her second.

• 54:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  So a couple of things here. Isn't all-party primary the same as an open primary?

• 54:06Speaker 01

  An open primary is different. An open primary is something where, hey, you're an unregistered voter. You can show up and vote in our primary this once. And in some cases, you have to register as that party for the purposes of that vote, and then you can un-register. A closed primary is you have to be registered four months in advance or something like that. A nonpartisan primary, what they did in Alaska is the most dramatic, which is, hey, everyone show up in the same primary. You vote for your candidate, I vote for my candidate. We can all vote for whichever candidate we want. We can even have multiple candidates from the same party running. And then the true measure of popular will and representation will emerge as opposed to slicing us into one party or another.

• 54:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Were the Alaska outcomes more about the all-party primary or more about the ranked choice voting, or did they dovetail perfectly?

• 55:00Speaker 01

  You know, it's an element where one plus one equals three, where nonpartisan primaries are dramatic improvement, ranked choice voting, general elections are dramatic improvement, but you put them together and you wind up with a candidate who genuinely has the backing of more than 50.1% of the people.

• 55:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  So here's the thing, I know you a little bit. We've spoken on this show a few times, we've spoken off the show a few times, and I know you to be sincere and intelligent and decent person who I think wants the best for a lot of people. You also sound a little bit bonkers to me right now because you are tilting at windmills that are gigantic. You speak with sincerity and I believe you, but do you expect to have any real effect on the political system, whether in 2024 or in the next 10 years with this forward party?

• 55:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. We already have dozens of elected officials who are aligned with the forward party. Two state senators in Pennsylvania, Lisa Boscola and Anthony Williams, the mayor of Fort Collins, Colorado. I mean, these are electeds who stood up already and said, you know what, I want to represent my constituents and I don't want to be answerable to this mega party that may or may not actually align with what the folks I represent believe in and value. And this is despite having a sliver of the resources of either the parties.

• 56:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  So if you could be a czar of some kind, even though we're not a country that embraces czars historically, and you had the ability to remake the political system, the electoral system, and you're not trying to do it in a drastic draconian overnight way, let's say you could build a 10-year plan, what would be the first three or five tenets of that 10-year plan?

• 56:51Speaker 01

  We'd need elections that actually make our representatives answerable to us. That's the main thing. We've let a bunch of negative things build up and Our leaders are unresponsive. If you had a genuine feedback loop, then all of a sudden, our leaders would say, wait a minute, what, like, young people can't afford a house? That's a problem. What the cost of being a middle-class person with housing and transportation and education healthcare is going up and up and you feel distraught about it? Like, let's actually get to some of the root problems. And the way to do that feasibly in an era when it's very difficult to imagine our elected leaders doing something against their self-interest is to go to states where they have the means

• 57:33Speaker 01

  to change the voting system and say, look, guys, let's just make it so that anyone can vote for any candidate of any party, à la Alaska, à la, we hope, Nevada as of November, and just march through as many states as possible, freeing our elected leaders from party primaries that, right now, keep them from making any meaningful progress on issues.

• 57:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here's the thing about Andrew Yang. He's enthusiastic, and he's enthusiastic about ideas that I think are generally good ones. But is he too enthusiastic about the odds of successful reform? What do you make of his prediction that someone like him can push our political system in a strong, positive direction? No offense to Andrew Yang, but his track record as a political forecaster is not so good. Last year, he told me that Dean Phillips, the Minnesota congressman who challenged Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primaries, was going to perform very well in the early states, so well that he would shake up the entire 2024 election.

• 58:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Phillips didn't perform well, and he ran back into the arms of his party and endorsed President Biden. You want to know why Phillips ran in the first place? He was worried that Joe Biden was simply too weak a candidate to win, and that backing him would pave the way for a Trump victory, which Phillips, being a Democrat, did not want. So, getting back to Andrew Yang's prediction, he was wrong that Dean Phillips would get a lot of primary support by attacking Biden, but after Biden's disastrous performance in that first debate, many Democrats and their supporters, including the New York

• 59:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Times editorial board, are calling for the president to be replaced on the Democratic ticket. So, maybe Andrew Yang was on to something after all.

• 59:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's our show for today. Sorry about my sore throat. Thanks for listening. I'd love to hear any feedback you have about this episode, or the political duopoly in general, or anything else you want to say, really. Our email is [email protected]. Coming up next time on the show, Daniel Kahneman is perhaps best known as the author of Thinking Fast and Slow, but he also helped revolutionize the fields of both psychology and economics, and his influence has been enormous. Kahneman recently died at age 90. A bunch of his peers, friends, and mentees recently got together to sort out just where that influence has landed. And we were there with microphones.

• 1:00:14Speaker 14

  He felt that this is the right way to do science.

• 1:00:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  I mean, partly Danny is to blame, although he didn't learn that before he passed away.

• 1:00:24Speaker 15

  In adversarial collaborations, the arbiter is the research assistant, the tiebreaker, and occasionally the therapist. Did they pay you for that?

• 1:00:36Speaker 14

  I'm getting paid the same as you, Maya.

• 1:00:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app, also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Greg Rizalinski and Zach Lepinski. Our staff also includes Alina Coleman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abouaji, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippon, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Julie Canfor, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly, and Tayo Jacobs. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers. Our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thank

• 1:01:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  you for listening.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  I can see myself, but is this audio only?

• 1:01:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's audio only. You can take off your pants if you want. Nice. It's the plan.

• 1:01:33Speaker 12

  The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything. Stitcher.