Ted Audio Collective Hello everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Felix. I'm me here.
And I'm Charlotte. Charlotte, it's great to see you again.
Thanks for having me.
Last time you were here, you were going to go see the Pirates of Penzance at some middle school.
How did it all go? I cannot remember a more enjoyable night at the theater.
And I go to the theater pretty often.
I have to say, I almost passed out with delight.
It was so fun. Oh my God.
I highly recommend that if you have an opportunity to go see really any middle school theater production, I think you're bound to be delighted.
You know, I actually recently went to a middle school dance.
And I have to say, I had exactly the same reaction.
I'm sure it wasn't quite Pirates of Penzance, but the enthusiasm and the joy of children at that stage, just loving performance.
It's absolutely fantastic.
Yeah, especially when children are at literally their most awkward to get up on stage and try to sell something.
It is such a triumph.
And I absolutely adore that.
It was very inspiring on multiple levels.
Wonderful. So we go from delightful cultural news to the heart realities of business.
I'm here. What do you have for us?
I've become interested in the moves made by several retailers, including CVS and Amazon and Best Buy, to get into primary care.
There have been a number of different acquisitions.
Most recently, CVS buying Oak Street Health for $10 billion.
Like what are these people doing?
And does it make any sense?
And Felix, what do you got?
I would like to talk about the job market.
We have some really surprising and interesting developments, how wages move.
And in particular, the employees who make some of the biggest gains and then others who miss out a little bit on opportunities in the job market.
And I find it all a little confusing.
So I can't wait to talk about it with the two of you.
Sounds great. Here are CVS and primary care physicians.
Yeah, so there's something going on in primary care where people suddenly find it quite attractive.
First, very recently, we had CVS buying Oak Street Health for about $10 billion, which is a primary care provider.
You might remember that Amazon late last year finally closed a deal to buy a similar primary care provider called One Medical.
And then, you know, you see these weird moves.
Best Buy is going to send their geek squad.
I saw that. To set up your home healthcare system.
Why are these people all trying to get into primary care?
A part of medicine that we don't necessarily associate with tons of revenues and profits.
You might remember Amazon in conjunction with JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway and General Motors tried a little healthcare thing.
It didn't seem to work out.
So what are they chasing?
And does it make any sense?
There's kind of an easy answer to this.
And then there's a longer, much more complicated answer to it.
The easy answer is they're chasing money because healthcare spending is almost 20 % of GDP.
Exactly. Baby boomers are aging.
So there's just an absolutely huge market here.
And then also these companies see real value in disrupting old models of healthcare delivery.
So Amazon, for instance, has been investing in telehealth.
And then the last thing I'd point to is there has been this strategic shift within the healthcare industry where there used to be pretty clear lines between different types of actors.
There were insurers or payers.
There were hospitals and doctors who were providers.
There were companies who were involved in the distribution and the sale of medicines.
But all these lines have been blurred.
So you have these traditional healthcare companies that have gotten bigger in different sorts of ways.
So you have United Healthcare, which is a big insurer, which has its own pharmacy benefit manager, Optum, which has also been buying its own doctors groups and surgery centers.
People think about CVS as a retailer, but it's CVS Etna.
Etna is a huge insurer.
And then you have companies like Amazon that we would think of as more traditional retailers who are really trying to get into this space and disrupt it.
I think this last point, Charlotte, seems particularly important to me.
When I first hear CVS, of course, I'm thinking of all the stores because that's what's very visible.
That's what we see.
But at this point in time, only about a third of their revenues actually comes from the stores.
And so we should think of CVS mostly as a health insurance company because Etna is so big and so important.
And so you might ask, why is it interesting for a health insurance company to be in the primary care market?
And there's sort of a nice and uplifting story.
And then as often in healthcare, there's a more sinister story at one at the same time.
The nice and uplifting story is something called value -based care.
So once you bring primary care physicians into your group, you can now more easily experiment with novel arrangements.
And one of these novel arrangements is called value -based care, where instead of fee for service, you pay your doctor every time he or she performs a particular procedure, you essentially pay either a fixed fee or you pay a fee per patient that depends on the patient's health.
And so that's sort of the uplifting positive story because it might help us to provide better health at lower cost.
The sinister story I think has a lot to do with experiences as a result of Obamacare.
So one that stands out here is you might remember this 80 -20 rule.
So insurance companies needed to spend at least 80 % of the premiums on patients, and only 20 % could be profits.
And in the beginning, one or two years that actually worked really well.
And then they figured out, oh, one thing we could do is we could just jack up revenue.
We could have doctors basically tell Medicare that they did more complicated procedures, they did more expensive things.
And so as a result, actually the patients did not really benefit from this 80 -20 rule, it's just that healthcare got even more expensive.
And the fear is that once insurance companies control primary care physicians, they will do exactly this.
They will advise or guide the primary care physicians in a way that ultimately leads to even further increases in healthcare costs.
I find your sunnier story more convincing, Felix, which is, I think it's part and parcel of this shift to value -based care and away from fee -for -service.
And I think that is the hugest story here.
And that is all kinds of wonderful in many ways.
The fee -for -service model I think has been broken for a while.
And effectively, you want to try to underwrite folks for actual effects and outcomes.
And I think that's what value -based care promises to do.
And the gatekeepers for that are primary care physicians.
So that all makes sense to me.
What doesn't make sense to me entirely is whether they know exactly what they're getting themselves into, which is to say, I think they're being allured by the 20 % of GDP number that Charlotte alluded to, and the sense that it's broken, so it's going to be easy to fix.
So I believe in the movement.
What I'm less convinced of is that these players are the right ones to actually execute on it and to realize the full value of it.
Too much of it feels a little bit to me like, well, we no longer want to be a drug store or retail store.
And so we have pivoted, which is what CVS has basically done.
They've basically taken all of their cash flows and pivoted towards becoming a healthcare company.
And that feels like a very dramatic bet, which could just as well not work out as it could work out.
It isn't exactly clear to me what their natural advantages to win in this space.
And so I see it from a system wide perspective quite positively.
I love the value -based care movement.
They've convinced themselves that they're the right winners, but they may not be.
Yeah, I think that's such an interesting point.
And you see that reflected in the real wide range of acquisitions that CVS has tried to undertake.
Yeah. So it's not just Oak Street Health.
It's Signify Health, which provides services at home.
That is not a small deal, and it's still under consideration for regulators.
That's $8 billion. And then at J .P.
Morgan's healthcare conference, they announced a few different acquisitions.
One was a telehealth company focusing on mental health.
But these big healthcare companies, whether it's CVS Etna, whether it's UnitedHealth, they have just been pursuing these massive deals.
But I share your view of me here, which is that on a macro level, I really think this is a good thing.
America has stood out for decades for its fee -for -service model in contrast to other rich countries in a way that has helped to drive up healthcare costs without a commensurate reflection in the health of Americans themselves.
And I think the idea that you can reward companies and make money through keeping patients well rather than just treating them when they're sick is clearly the right thing.
It's just that the devil's in the details, and there are a whole lot of details that can go wrong.
Right. It's just a question of who the winners are, and do they do this well.
So CVS had a big problem last year when one of its Medicare Advantage plans, which is the sort of private administration of Medicare that many Americans opt for, didn't meet its quality rating, and so it didn't get the commensurate bonus.
So that was one pretty big sign that CVS actually wasn't living up to the standard that it would seek.
So, agree with you on the macro, the micro is the problem.
Felix, are you assuaged by our nice stories about value -based care?
I find myself in a very unusual position in that I'm usually the most optimistic person.
I'm so happy to see the tables turned.
I'm so happy. I'm more skeptical for two reasons.
One is, it's not a coincidence to me that Oak Street Health and many of the other acquisition targets actually care for seniors who are by and large on Medicare.
That is, for many of them, the government will be the ultimate payer.
And how do you get more money out of the government by controlling the kinds of conditions that you tell the government a particular person has?
It's also true that there is a lot of evidence that this is so much more profitable than other services in healthcare.
And I understand CVS, if you compare its share performance with the share performance of United Health that has greater integration with primary care physicians.
If you look at a longer time period over the last five years, United Health has basically doubled and CVS has gone up by 15%.
So I think there is enormous pressure to go in that direction.
And everything we know from greater integration in healthcare, just remember all the hospital mergers.
What was that supposed to do?
That was supposed to make healthcare so much more efficient and we have economies of scale and we can share resources.
And then when our colleagues at HBS looked at what actually happened as a result of hospital mergers, prices went up.
Basically, you now have more bargaining power vis -à -vis the insurance companies.
I think when Obamacare came in and tried to force insurers to share the benefits of value -based care with the patients, that didn't happen because you found ways around it by classifying the health status of patients that you take care of in particular ways.
So I would be so happy to be really surprised and really be wrong here.
But the history doesn't bode well.
Charlotte, I love this negative version of fields.
It's crazy. I mean, a couple of things.
So the first is on the comparison between CVS and United Health, I think that's a super interesting comparison.
I'm not sure that we learn more about the broader welfare implications of this.
So I think you're right, United Health does it way better because they are better integrated.
That could be because they're creating larger profit pools or it could be because this is a harder game than they think.
And it's a harder thing to pull off.
And the kind of acquisition strategies that CVS has employed may not be quite as robust as United's tighter integration.
And to the second point about whether the tighter integration works, I totally believe your evidence and what people have generated about hospital mergers.
But I think this is different.
I think it's different because hospital mergers can be about reducing competition and can be about taking out not -for -profit players.
Value -based care is fundamentally about contracting on outcomes that we should be able to contract on as opposed to contracting on services or inputs.
That is fundamentally different and quite positive.
So I take United Health's success not as the manifestation of like vast profit pools that they're exploiting, but as the promise of what value -based care can do.
And I think what CVS and others make it wrong is they think they can take advantage of Medicare.
And actually what may end up happening is that CMS who runs Medicare and who runs a lot of these things actually becomes a really tough bargainer.
And if they become a really tough bargainer, then I think actually the profits aren't exactly there.
But yet we might get the really good results we want to get, which I think is a great outcome in many ways.
Yeah, I want to take a step back for a minute just because I think when you're in the American context, it can be easy to forget how weird our health system is.
It is so deeply weird.
We like to think of ourselves as having a more market -based system.
A system that in contrast to those communists in Europe is about allowing free enterprise to deliver optimal solutions for patients.
And it's just very clear that it does not for all number of reasons.
One of which is that if you wanted to have real competition in healthcare, and this goes back to your point Felix on the hospital mergers, you would have something called transparency and pricing.
A patient would need to be able to know what they were buying at what price, which by the way, they never do.
And you can take that one dysfunction and multiply it across all different parts of the healthcare system to understand the ways in which rather than a free market system, we have something that is completely obscured and bizarre because of the way that these different actors do and don't have transparency,
the way that those contracts are and are not clear to other actors within the healthcare system.
Patients, yes, but even other types of companies within the healthcare system.
I just raised this as a little asterisk on our conversation that there are just a lot of things around our healthcare system that are very, very strange.
And the result right now are these big behemoths that are trying to pursue value -based care, which I think is really good.
But they are doing it within a system that is inherently just dysfunctional.
And so I think that that is part of the reason why you see some of these complications arise.
So of course, I can't help myself bring up one positive point in all of this.
We have an incredible shortage in primary care physicians.
So if in fact, vertical integration somehow helps to make being a primary care physician more just financially attractive, I think there could be dramatic upsides.
The gap, of course, is relatively big.
Cardiologists typically makes about half a million dollars.
A primary care physician makes roughly 200 ,000.
As a result, in the U .S., about 12 % of all doctors are primary care physicians in Canada, in Australia, maybe not the typical, it's about 40 -45 % of all doctors who are primary care physicians.
So to the point that you brought up earlier, Charlotte, thinking about all the not so technically complicated, quite mundane services that need to be provided to an aging population.
If this move in some way helps making it more attractive to be a primary care physician, I think that would actually be great for the system.
See, I knew we couldn't keep the irrepressible optimist down, Charlotte.
He's back. And the way the U .S.
healthcare system, as you pointed out, Charlotte, is completely idiosyncratic and weird and in many ways deeply dysfunctional.
But I think it's going to become the playground for lots of interesting business dynamics in the next decade as we see this play out.
And it should be really fun to watch.
So Felix, you wanted to talk about wages in the labor market.
Yes, it's just incredibly interesting what's been happening in the last one or two years.
You look at longer term time trends.
And what you see is that wage inequality just goes up and up.
And there seems to be these really big global forces that just say people at the top will make more tomorrow and people at the bottom will either be not making much progress or even be worse off.
And then in the last two years, inequality has fallen by about a quarter.
So if you look at the increase in inequality over 40 years, we lost 25 % of that inequality essentially overnight.
And it's really interesting where the gains are located.
It's mostly people at the very bottom of the wage ladder.
So the kinds of jobs that don't require a high school degree don't require a college degree.
And then even more interesting, people who switch jobs.
So switching jobs was really essential for benefiting from the general situation.
And I was just curious to see, do you think this is a permanent change that at the bottom of the ladder, people are now better off?
We somehow have found a cure for the ever increasing inequality?
Or is it some peculiarity having to do with our exit out of COVID, the pandemic that created these big wage gains at the bottom?
What's your sense of what's going on in the job market?
Incomes were rising for poor people even before the pandemic.
But you saw really in the past two years, a few things happen.
You had the Americans that were in the lowest distribution of incomes really benefit from stimulus checks and the expansion of unemployment insurance.
You had more states that were raising the minimum wage.
And then crucially, you had a lot of churn in the labor market, just because it's so tight.
That you've had people who look for better jobs.
They switch out of their retail job into a slightly better hospitality job, for instance.
And they have been able to secure higher wages in that churn.
And you see, even as the labor market starts to soften a bit, in January, the latest survey from the federal government said that there were still 1 .9 available jobs for every job seeker.
So that's a really good environment for low wage workers to be looking around.
I would note, just to state the obvious, that rising inflation means that it's not like these people are enjoying a cushy life at the moment.
We have to think about this in the context of rising inflation.
But nevertheless, these dynamics are pretty powerful.
Just to put some concrete numbers on it, Target is now hiring employees at hourly wage rates north of $20 an hour.
I think it's a wonderful story.
And I think the deep question, the hard question is, will it last?
Part of the explanation is labor markets sometimes get stuck in weird equilibria.
And when you shake it, everything breaks a little bit.
And so I think what we had with the pandemic is everything broke a little bit.
And specifically, it's all about quitting.
What we observe is a lot higher quit rates, particularly amongst those groups, and an increased willingness to quit, which is how historically, wage gains are achieved.
You have to quit, and you have to go to a different place to rise up the wage ladder.
That's how labor markets work.
And so we shook the labor market really hard.
And we got out of an equilibrium where people didn't quit.
And I think that is almost a little bit of your story, Felix, which is stimulus checks, unemployment insurance, child tax credits, but it's also the inertia of being in a job and thinking it's the job.
And then somehow you get pushed into a new place.
So that makes me optimistic.
What makes me slightly less optimistic is obviously we are still in this incredibly tight labor market where unemployment rates are 3 .6%, 3 .7%.
And there's two job openings for every unemployed worker completely abnormal by any measure over the last 20 years.
And that will change because of the large interest rate hikes that we're still flowing through the system.
And that's when we're going to see if there's really lasting power to this.
And for that, I'm less sure.
Meaning, will the gains that we've achieved stay?
Yes. But will they continue in the way that we've seen in the last two to three years?
I find that a little bit harder to swallow.
I'd add one thing to that in the column of optimism, which is that one thing that we've seen in the past few years is that jobs that were essentially just crappy jobs, to use the technical term.
You never knew when your shift was going to be.
It was a constantly shifting schedule.
You didn't have any opportunity to advance.
There are companies that have looked at those quit rates and said, okay, how do we get people to stay?
And it's not about the office ping pong table or whatever.
It's about predictable shifts.
It's about offering training.
It's about making it a type of workplace where an employee doesn't want to immediately quit because they're so miserable and they don't have predictability, et cetera.
So I think that those types of changes, I wonder whether they will be more lasting just because the costs of churn have become so evident to employers.
It's just really bad for business to constantly be losing workers.
I think that's one thing that I hope will be a little sticky.
One question I have for both of you is how you think about the labor force participation rate in this conversation about a really tight labor market, because you still have a lot of Americans who aren't looking for jobs who are just really out of the labor force.
And there's a lot of focus on men because the labor force participation rate has declined so precipitously for them since the 1950s.
But also women, I mean, if you look at women in America, about 75 % of women of prime working age are in the labor force, but that's about 5 percentage points below the average for the rest of the G7, so other really big, rich countries.
And elsewhere, the share of women who are working has increased in the past 20 years.
And America is the only place where the share of women working has declined.
So what do you make of that?
What's really interesting to me about the question that you ask, Charlotte, is in some sense, it's the government twice.
If you're looking pre -pandemic, where are the big wage gains for those who don't make all that much money to begin with?
It was essentially the minimum wage laws passed by different states and passed in different cities that then created wage gains at the very bottom.
So that was government action.
And then it was government action again during the pandemic in that it just enabled a larger number of people to hold out for a little while.
I think holding out as both positive and negative connotations, which I think are important for the labor participation question, on the positive side, you got the stimulus check.
And so maybe now you are not quite as hard pushed back into taking a job that maybe wasn't so attractive to begin with.
Cumulatively, this meant that in order to get people back into jobs, we had to pay much higher wages.
On the more problematic side, even today, it's things like missing childcare that really prevent many women from rejoining the job market.
My sense is that once these obstacles are gone, so you're comfortable having your kids in school, you can actually find someone to take care of them if they're too young to go to school, then I would not be surprised.
And the trends definitely point to a participation rate among women that is not so different.
But what I never really thought about, and what is really fascinating to me, is that by providing a particular cushion that then upsets the labor market.
As you said, Meir, we get to have a completely different labor market.
And of course, if you look at the biggest changes in labor markets in history, they have exactly that kind of template.
So the most famous is the plague in the 1300s that kills a large fraction of humanity.
And that means incredible wage gains for farmers.
And essentially, for the first time, we go from indentured servitude and serfs, we're going to a wage economy where wages are paid the way we're more used to it now.
And that never went away.
And so maybe the most optimistic view of what is happening is we're sort of see the beginning of new institutions, more predictable schedules is a great example, maybe more training, we see the beginning of new institutions that actually will stay irrespective of where exactly we are in the business
cycle. I mean, I like this story that you both are articulating about the permanence of this change.
And it relates, I think, a little bit to things you thought a lot about, Felix, which is about thinking harder about employees as a source of value.
And I think that could be a significant change.
And Charlotte, these changes are hard to reverse because people understand now how costly churn is and they want to kind of invest in employees in a way they may not have wanted to before.
I think that's right.
To your question, Charlotte, about the fraction of the labor force that's potentially missing.
This is like one of the super interesting puzzles that is going on right now.
I'm becoming convinced that it's not clear there are that many people missing.
You kind of look at total employment pre COVID.
And now we're kind of getting roughly to where we were.
So this is, I think, like a real area of debate.
There's one school of thought, which is there's like this huge overhang of people who can come back into the labor force because they've been missing.
I'm not sure I believe it.
I think actually, we're kind of back there.
The final piece I was curious about to get your perspective on is one of the consequences of this, which is weird, is that the wage premium to go into college has gone down a lot.
Historically, going to college was a way to raise your wages.
And now if you're making $25 an hour target, that trade of going and investing in human capital is very different.
I'm curious if you think this is going to cause a shift in the willingness and desirability of going to college if the wage premium and the wage gains just aren't there.
Because one of the consequences of this Felix is at the low end, you can live pretty well without incurring debt and without spending four years conceivably in a college.
Do you think that'll play out?
I have to say I hope it plays out as someone who doesn't have a horse in the race here.
I think that America, for a long time, rightly, was focused on having as many people go and secure a four year degree as possible.
But that does have costs.
The opportunity cost of earning wages sooner in a person's life.
It has the cost of college itself, of course.
And there are all kinds of investments and types of training that would be hugely beneficial to help workers secure all kinds of jobs.
And I think that the idea that you go to college for a set amount of time, whether it's four or five, six years, whatever, the idea that you spend a discrete amount of time in school, and then the rest of your professional time is just working.
Does it really reflect how jobs have evolved, where you're doing continuous training, industries change quickly.
You might go and secure a skills based degree at a community college, and then go back to that community college in several years to advance even further.
I just think the whole idea of a four year degree certainly has merit for some types of jobs.
But for a lot of jobs, it just doesn't.
What do you think, Felix?
Yeah, I completely agree with that.
And we see interesting changes on the employer side that reflect this trend.
My sense is requiring for particular jobs to have a college degree was often sort of a lazy shorthand.
It wasn't really deeply thinking about do I need with only a person with a college degree had.
And so what we've seen in a very tight labor market that firms have become much more thoughtful about the kinds of criteria.
That would allow you to apply for a job.
And I love that we're thinking really deeply about what's the skill set?
How much can we invest in our employees and make them better at what we asked them to do over time?
As opposed to this super general requirement that then creates two or three classes of employees, where you see very little permeability really for no good reason.
I actually think this is one of the great stories that's going to come out of all of this is allowing for much more flexibility in the way people gather human capital.
Because for a long time that college wage premium has been so robust and so big that it became a default.
And to your point, Charlotte, for not particularly good reasons.
And so I think actually the real fallout here is in higher education and in higher education, thinking about better ways to create lifelong learning, to, do things that actually create value for students in the short run, and to just create more choice, as opposed to kind of the cookie cutter model
that we've been involved in.
So I think that actually is one of the great longer lasting pieces of this.
Can I ask you a final question about a management headache?
Yeah. In a world where quitting leads to higher wages.
Now in your company, the employees who arrived most recently, often will make perhaps even more than employees who were super loyal and stayed in their positions for a very long time.
What do you do? Do you wait for the next recession and then you let everyone go who arrived recently?
Do you raise everyone's wage in order to create some sense of fairness that you want to reward people who have shown loyalty?
What's the inside the company response to quitting leading to higher wages?
Before you answer that, Mihir, I want to add one more wrinkle, which is what do you do when you're in a state that has a new wage transparency law?
Yes. Yeah, I think you don't want to create several different categories of employees and pay for fundamentally similar work.
So I think you have to bring up everyone's wages.
And I think that's what's happening.
It's not just the quidders who get the raises, it's the people who benefit from it, who are staying at the company.
And I think that has got to be the way this plays out.
At higher levels of management, you can create a little bit more heterogeneity in how you pay.
Although I don't think it's advisable.
I actually think the way to play this is with more transparency, not just because of those laws, Charlotte, but because otherwise, it's deeply complicated, deeply unfair.
And then when the shakeout comes, you're not necessarily going to do it in the best possible way, because you're going to be confused about who really is productive and who's justifying their wages.
So I think you want more transparency and more homogeneity than ever before.
The one thought that strikes me is, if in fact we follow your advice me here, that means the kind of wage gains that we see among workers who quit.
Those are just an indication of much more expensive labor more generally.
Now it means saying, oh, I'm looking for a person and I can only find that person if I pay $22.
If the implication is now I'm going to pay $22 for everyone in my organization.
That I think is a very powerful argument for the wage inflation link that I think is a super big concern for the Fed and many other policymakers.
But I think there is no other way, right?
So I mean, if you're running Target and you have to attract employees at starting levels at $25 an hour, there's no way in complex large organizations like that to not bring everybody to $25.
It's almost impossible.
Yeah, I agree with that.
But to your point, Felix, it's conceivable that this is precisely the spiral that we worry about.
It's one of the things I just truly love about business so much.
You can look at a single number, just look at how wages for a particular group go up over time.
And then it's typically connected to a million things.
It's connected to how well businesses do.
It's connected to the rate of inflation.
It's probably connected to whether we will see new work arrangements that really make jobs better jobs.
So this one number, I think, is just a little hole through which you can observe an incredible range of responses to this unusual moment in time that we call the pandemic.
And we have recommendations.
Meir, what do you have?
For a long time, I used to think that as a parent, it was good to like dribble out little goodies.
But recently, I've just decided to go all in in catering to my daughters.
And in the spirit of sharing a parenting hack, I'm not somebody who observes Easter, but I will say, Easter egg hunts with Cadbury cream eggs, we are now doing them nightly, well in advance of Easter.
And I got to tell you, Cadbury cream eggs are delicious.
And the joy of an Easter egg hunt on a nightly basis as they struggle with their exams has got to be the high point of my parenting career.
So I recommend Cadbury cream eggs.
I recommend the joy of Easter egg hunts.
And I recommend doing it as often as possible.
Pre and post Easter.
As long as they're selling them, you know, they don't show up much after April, or it's harder to find them.
So as much as possible all the time is my recommendation.
Wonderful. I had a more highbrow rack, but now I wonder if I should just go with my parenting hack.
I'll give you both.
Okay, good. One is a book by my colleague at the Economist Oliver Morton called The Moon, which is just a beautiful book.
He has such an interesting mind.
And it combines science with history with literary references.
And he's an absolutely lovely writer.
So I highly recommend it.
Very good. My much lowerbrow parenting hack is that every parent should invest in a disco ball or something that casts rotating lights around your living room.
It can transform any apartment into a Saturday night fever type vibe.
And if you need to exhaust your children, you just plug it in and everybody dance around for half an hour and then you're good.
Wonderful. That is a great recommendation.
I have an old one in my basement from my teen years.
Bring it out. I never quite managed to get rid of it exactly for the reason that you point out, Charlotte.
I just had this image of Felix in like a John Trabolta Saturday night fever kind of outfit.
Yeah, exactly. Give the listeners what they want.
Okay, Felix, what do you got?
I guess mine is sort of in the middle between high and lowbrow.
It's a game. It's called the Fiscal Ship, and it's at fiscalship .org.
And the game is developed by the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at Brookings.
And the idea is that debt in the U .S.
economy is rising over time.
And the goal is to bring debt under control.
And so the way the game works is that you start out with policy propositions and each one of them tells you this will bring in more revenue, this will be expensive, this will not be so expensive.
And then you see after you go through all of these choices, the kinds of things that you want.
And there's aggregate choices also, for instance, if you like the Biden agenda, that's almost like an old fashioned voting machine lever where you pull that one letter and you get all the Biden policies.
And then you see the implications for debt.
The most interesting thing is just how incredibly difficult it is, even if you think, okay, so I'm going to be super stingy and only do the seven things that I truly, truly, truly believe in.
I would bet probably not good enough to get the debt under control.
So it's a fun gamification of something that is actually quite interesting and also gives you a sense of just the dozens and dozens of policy choices that ultimately will influence the level of debt in the economy.
Wow. That sounds kind of sobering, Felix.
I like it. You can win.
I don't know how good I felt about the economy that I produce, but there is a chance to win, which is always nice.
That's great. And this is it for today.
Thank you for listening.
This was After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.
