Why Human Progress Is Not Inevitable - ft. Carl Frey

i'm not of the view that every technology is good but unfortunately many times it's you know hard to know beforehand it's hard to know before somebody has invested in it and it's been adopted in the marketplace. I'm Bethany McLean. Did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed's a good idea? And I'm Lucia Zingales. We have socialism for the very rich rugged individualism for the poor. And Mrs. Capital Isn't a podcast about what is working in capitalism. First of all, tell me is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed? And most importantly, what isn't? We ought to do better by the people that get left behind. I don't think we should have killed the capital system in the process. It can be so easy to take progress for granted. Air conditioning, refrigerators, life-saving drugs, the internet. We will forget what a life would be without technological advancement. How much harder our lives could be. And I guess how much better our lives might be in the future if progress continues. This is, after all, one of the promises of capitalism. Progress on ending, sort of. But is progress inevitable? Is it intrinsic to capitalism or is something that can slow down or even end? And is that end coming sooner than we think? So one person who thinks we might be is Carl Benedict Frey, the author of the new book, How Progress Ends, Technology, Innovation and the Fate of Nations. Wow, that's a big title. Carl's core message is deeply unsettling. Technological progress is not inevitable. It can stall, it can reverse. And often it does, not because we run out of ideas, but because our institutions stop letting those ideas transform society. At the heart of the book is a core tension. Decentralization foster exploration and innovation, while centralized bureaucracies excel at exploitation, which means scaling and implemented technology at large scale. Frey applies this framework to many historical societies, i.e. Song China, the Dutch Republic, Victorian Britain, the Soviet Union, post-war Japan, and to modern economies, the US, Europe and China, arguing that even today, today's leaders cannot assume technological breakthroughs, even like AI, will automatically translate into broader economic and social progress. And it's common these days to just oppose the United States and China and say, how great China is doing and how bad the United States is doing. Instead, Carl is saying that, no, both the United States and China are heading towards stagnation, while in a very different way. Welcome to the show Carl Frey, author of the new book How Progress Ends. The core message of your book is a deeply unsettling one. It's that technological progress isn't inevitable. It can stall, it can reverse. And often it does, not because we run out of ideas, but because our institutions stop letting those ideas transform society. But I wanted to start with, especially today with concerns about AI, I think many people have become disillusioned with the idea that progress actually even is a good thing. So can we start out with you making the case for progress and why it is that we should be concerned about it ending? Well, in the end of the day, our living standards, material standards, depend on it. Even politically, an economy that isn't growing over the long run eventually becomes a zero sum game, in which the only way I can improve my standard of living is at the expense of somebody else. That doesn't strike me as a very healthy situation. The sort of raw correlation between self-reported life satisfaction and income is around 0.8, so it's a fairly strong relationship. And so in the interest of improving the well-being and life satisfaction of the population, technological progress is an important part of that, just because it raises our incomes, but it gives us access to things that people couldn't even dream of a century ago. Now, let me try on the other side. Many economists and many venture capitalists are in ammo with technology at the point at the one that technology at the highest speed. If you read Mark Andreessen, Technology Manifesto, he's basically saying any day we delay technology, we're killing people, so we should go as fast as possible. Are you subscribing to this view or not? I'm not sure if I'm subscribing to that view, but I think the pace of technological change is quite hard to control. There is a concern that the more barriers you put up to slow technological change, those barriers are not unlikely, I would say, to be captured by an incumbent that keeps those barriers in place for a long time. That said, I can certainly think of technologies I wish that we hadn't developed the cotton gin being one example of that. So I'm not of the view that every technology out there is good, but unfortunately, many times it's hard to know beforehand. And I think, frankly, many people criticize open AI releasing chat dpt into the world, and I can understand that many people do feel that it was premature. I don't think we would have much of a debate over AI regulation to begin with if that hadn't been the case. I don't believe that we will be able to specify a set of rules and regulations, ex ante, that will deal with any potential harm that AI could cause down the line. Like technological progress, institutional change is also a matter of trial and error. So is your argument overall, despite the mistakes in the past that have come from perhaps moving forward too quickly and embracing new technologies too quickly, that the risk of not moving forward is higher than the risk of simply moving forward? I do think that the risk of not moving forward right now is pretty high. One of the arguments I've made in the book is that it's not just Europe and Britain that has a growth problem. There are many concerns that artificial intelligence will threaten democracy through misinformation, somewhere about existential threats, but I also think it's a real risk that the technology, frankly, doesn't live up to the expectation and may be in part because institutions don't adjust. To me, it remains a puzzle that you go back to the 90s and you take the web and the personal computer. I mean, these are astoundingly powerful technologies. What do we get out of it? A decade streak of productivity growth mostly confined to the United States, a decline in research productivity, by most estimates, a decline in breakthrough innovation, as far as I can tell. I feel like we have to ask ourselves why that is. I may not have been able to fully answer that question in the book, and so I plead guilty to that, but at least I hope it does inform the debate around that a little bit. No, it certainly does. So at the heart of your book, there is a core tension between this intelligiation that fosters exploration and innovation and centralized bureaucracy that accelerates exploitation and the scaling of technology. Can you give us a quick explanation of this tension and why it's so important that it's at the heart of your book? In the early stages of the technology life cycle, you don't know whether what you do is going to be a success or not. If you're an investor, you don't know what's going to catch on and what's not. So you want to preferably invest in different technological trajectories. So the Soviet Union was the most centralized economy we've seen so far. If you were an aircraft engineer in the Soviet Union and you wanted funding for your idea, you could go to the Red Army and ask for funding. If they declined, maybe add two or three other options. If they declined, your idea would die with you. That's quite different to the US system where Ambassador Venture famously declined to invest in Google back in 1999. They probably regretted today. But it also illustrates that Google wasn't a safe bet at the time. Altavista and Yahoo were dominating search and so you need to invest to know something will catch on. And you can invest in a broader range of projects in a more decentralized economy. But at some point, economies of scale do matter. And so without that, Ford would not have been able to produce the T4 that is sufficiently low cost for it to become the people's vehicle. And so both of these processes matter to technological development, but they're supported by quite different institutions as I argue in the book. One of the fascinating things about your book is that you don't actually argue that either system is better. And you argue that right now, both China and the US and it's often posited as one wins and the other loses. But you argue that both actually might be headed for a period of stagnation. Can you explain that for our listeners? Yeah, if you look around the world today, productivity growth has been rather disappointing. After a brief uptake in the US between roughly 95 and 2004, productivity growth has been disappointing. It's been disappointing in Europe and it's even been disappointing in China, especially since the Great Recession, where by some estimates it's even turned into negative territory. And I think what US and China obviously has many differences both in economic and political systems, but they do, I think, share a common feature in that more power is being centralized. And so in China, I think after the opening in the late 1970s, it's fair to say that much of the growth was facilitated by the fact that provincial governors had a large degree of autonomy. And so they could experiment with different institutions. The party retained a monopoly over promotion within the party system and it set growth targets. And essentially, governors would compete for positions inside the party on the basis of meeting growth targets. And since the 2010s, more power has been centralized in Beijing in particular. Industrial policy, which was used to be more local, has become increasingly centralized. Objectives are no longer just focused on economic growth, but other political priorities such as technological self-sufficiency and national security. And because private firms are often not very keen on pursuing objectives that are not economic, in China it's once more dependent on state enterprises, which also have more political power by having seat inside the party. In the United States, as you know very well on this podcast, market concentration has been going up, spending on lobbying has been going up since the 1990s. We see a range of anti-competitive practices, whether it's patent examiners that use PTO, granting low quality patents, and then moving into work for technology incumbents that they've granted these patents to. You see some outright killer acquisitions whereby incumbents buy up promising firms just to shut them down. And other practices too. And so there's been a growing concentration across most industries and that has gone hand in hand with less dynamism, less entry even in the technology sector. And I think that's part of the reason why growth has slowed. So certainly I'm not going to quarrel with that, but I'm curious because your book emphasized a lot innovation and diffusion and you claim that one of the reasons for the success of Silicon Valley versus who 28 in Massachusetts was the fact that in California the non-compete closures are not enforced. And maybe I miss it. I don't see you talk a lot about the increase in enforcement of intellectual property rights in America and the war stage. Since trips, I don't remember what is the acronym is for, but is trade-related intellectual property rights enforcement. It was started in the mid-1980s and made it much more difficult actually for follow-up countries, but also for follow-up firms to use new ideas and new technologies coming along. Do you think it displayed a role? So I do think that the pharmaceutical industry in particular has lobbied quite well in making sure that prices are kept high and generic alternatives are kept to minimum and that has had an effect that it slowed down the diffusion of pharmaceutical products. I'm less sure when it comes to digital and ICT products. I think in my mind at least the problem there is more that we have these very complex technologies with a lot of intersecting patents where you really only know exactly what the patent covers after you ended up in court and then you have large firms with large patent portfolios using intellectual property rights as barriers to entry. They use it as bargaining chip and cross-licensing and negotiations and James Besson has estimated that outside pharma and chemicals litigation costs are actually higher than the value firms derive from patents in production. It used to be one product, one patent, right? Now it's more one product, a thousand patents and I think that complexity has made the patent system very litigious and has meant that barriers to entry have increased and I think that's been the bigger factor. When you think about how advances in the world today are being made through sheer scale in the development of manufacturing prowess, whether it's in semiconductors or in batteries, is there any evidence that the arc of the world is shifting away from exploration and toward exploitation? And does deep-seek play into that at all? So I think most industries sort of naturally shift away from exploration to exploitation as they mature. And so in the industries you mentioned, I think that's certainly true. I'm less sure about AI in particular though. And so I don't think we know yet whether the future of AI is large language models, whether it's small language models, whether it's some fusion between deep neural networks and symbolic AI, or if it's something else. We have this paradigm of scaling in AI, throwing more compute and more data at the problem and getting a better performance as a result of that. I think we seem to be running into some diminishing return there and I think, you know, we're fully back at the paradigm where we need more research, more new ideas. So I'm not so sure about AI, but I think in EVs and solar and some of these other technology fields where China is doing quite well, I think, so now more about exploitation and scaling than experimentation. So is it possible to identify a chief villain in all of this, the villain that blocks progress? And if so, is it corporate power that becomes entrenched? Is it the state that doesn't want to be challenged? Or is the broader issue simply human nature that if we can, we'll stop and preserve the world as it was rather than the world as it might be? You know, it differs a bit from case to case. And so often today's revolutionary becomes tomorrow's incumbent. I think there's certainly something to that. To do that, I think that's the reason why we see quite similar patterns across countries, because it is to some degree human nature. If you have something to defend, if you have a product in the marketplace and you fear that those revenues will be undermined by new products, you're less likely to launch it than Kodak is a good example of that. It's probably also reason that Google was hesitant early on to launch the kind of generative AI that OpenAI launched, for example. This is an interesting tension because you emphasize the role of the state in actually enforcing antitrust and enforcing diffusion. You refer to, of course, the famous consent decree of AT&T that spread the transistor. You refer to the fact that the computer evolution took place at the time where IBM stopped integrating the software with the hardware as a result of antitrust. Also, the Microsoft trial sort of made the internet easier. Now, the challenge is that for the state to perform this function, the state should be independent of corporate power, which makes it very difficult because today in the United States, I don't see the state being interested in playing this role, even under a democratic administration where Lina Kan and John R. Kanter were working very actively. Congress was completely on the sideline and nothing was produced, and a lot of the gains achieved in my view are temporary. So how do you solve this tension? I don't think there is an easy answer, unfortunately, and that's why the book is called How Progress Ends. But I think if you go back historically, I think there are two ways sort of broadly speaking out of it. One is geopolitical competition. In Europe, before the Industrial Revolution, from the 12th century onwards, production in Europe was basically controlled by Kraft Guilds. I think one of the reasons that the First Industrial Revolution happens first in Britain is that their political clout is undercut in Britain first, partly because parliament begins to underwrite acts through the turnpikes that spurs market integration, that entails overriding the rights of select landowners as well. And that competition means that guilds which control the craft in their city also lift face competition from the outside, and then the state begins to clamp down on Kraft Guilds more directly as well because it realises that British wages are quite high and so forth. Britain to compete globally in trade needs to mechanise production. Similarly, all across Europe, you see that precious defeat to Napoleon, Jaina in 1806 leads to guilds being abolished. Russia begins to liberalise a little bit after devastating losses in the Crimean War and so on. And so the state can perform that function due to when faced with your political pressure. The other mechanism is by having a relatively mobilised public. And so I think we saw that in the United States during the Gilded Age, where grassroots movements pushed for changes through the Peddleton Act, which led to a meritocratic civil service, which then went on to institute new laws and regulations such as the Sherman Antitrust Act. And so when the public is more mobilised on issues, on re-arrogations, they can serve as I think a healthy, countervailing force to entrenched economic corporate power. But given this fragility of progress, if you were king for a day, what kind of institutional reform you will introduce in the United States or in China or in Europe to make sure that progress does not end? If I was also king for a day, I would politely decline. But if I were able to give some advice, I think market integration in Europe is quite important, particularly when it comes to services. And so what's striking to me in Europe is that if you look at the post-war period, Europe managed to catch up quite effectively in manufacturing industries. In digital, Europe has not even managed to catch up yet, push the technological frontier. And so I think part of that is that single market for services is just much less harmonised. That makes it hard for firms to scale. I think in China, get rid of the party system is that good advice? I'm not sure that sort of advice will have much of an effect in the United States. And I think it's hard to know where to start these days, is it immigration policies, is it funding being cut to leading research institutions, is it tariffs and the range of exemptions that mean that only have politically clout are able to navigate them and get those kind of exemptions. And so I wouldn't proclaim that there is one sort of a unifying solution to all those problems. So continuing on that thread of the United States at the risk of being a US-focused person, how do you see what's happening now? It seems to me, I may be a disagree with this formulation that we're in this period of change in the relationship between corporate power and government power. With tariffs, with the government taking stakes in companies, with the government controlling more of what corporations do. Is there any historical analogy for where the United States is right now or is this uncharted territory? So I think going back to the 2000s, many people predict that China would become more like the United States. Now it looks like the United States is becoming more like China. In terms of historical power, I think the closest I can think of would be the Gilli the Dage, but with the difference that during that period you had these grassroots movements, you had eventually pushed for reform, you had the emergence of a meritocratic civil service, no events are going in the opposite direction. So the civil service is being completely handicapped in its ability to carry out its tasks by the Trump administration. I think what is happening in the United States is that you're seeing more power being concentrated in the hands of the executive, but then without increasingly the civil service to actually be able to execute and implement on those policies. And so the key difference between China and Russia today is that in Russia, most of the political power is in the hands of one person, but he doesn't have the state capacity to implement many of his wishes. In China, meritocratic civil service means that the state is much more able to implement its policies. And I think the United States is probably starting to look more like Russia than China in that regard. That's very optimistic. But thinking about China, one of your argument, which I think historically is certainly true, is that if you try to restrict circulation of ideas because you want to maintain a control of a party or an ideology over a country, you make it also more difficult to have the circulation of ideas that are necessary for progress to develop. So during the period of the Soviet Union, it was difficult in Russia to have foreign magazines, whether this were political magazines or even scientific reviews. So clearly, this was an obstacle. However, if we look at China today and how they master the censorship in the Internet, they are able to let 99% of the ideas and things circulate retaining and filtering the 1% that they don't want it to circulate, which is certainly not the scientific component. So is it possible, and I see this as a danger, not as a wish, but is it possible that technology now has made possible the combination of a central ideological, a censoring power, and a free intellectual environment for scientific innovation? I think there's something to that. The disadvantage in the academic sphere of having a highly centralized political system is that you're less likely to attract talent. Ask your college how many of them would like to move to China and would like to be a researcher in China. That is not to say that you wouldn't have access to the same flow of information. You would have access to the same publications in China. But I think if you look at the Chinese scientific output, a lot of it comes from Chinese researchers who studied abroad, come back, a lot of it comes from international collaborations. And when you start to sort of clamp down on those knowledge pipelines, I think it's quite likely that you will have a problem down the line. And so I don't think the key bottleneck is the access to information. It's more about the clamp down on international collaboration and the ability to attract scientific talent that are the key bottlenecks. So right now we're in a time, at least in the U.S., where we're tossing off the shackles of regulation in the AI race, because everything has become about beating China, that the U.S. has to be able to beat China. Therefore, we can't regulate because that will get in the way. Is it, with the historical parallels you've seen in your book, is it that clear cut that a huge government push to win and to beat China and toss off these shackles of regulation will lead to innovation, or is there a possibility that that does the opposite? It's certainly a possibility that it does the opposite. And so it's quite striking to see at the moment as China is openly embracing open source AI, how those models are gaining market share all around the world, and how that might actually undercut proprietary models which may not be able to turn a profit because of that competition. And so it's not just a matter of national regulation. It seems that the American tech industry has made one big bet at the moment on proprietary large language models. China, out of necessity and being behind, opted for open weights. And so far, that seems to have been a good bet. But as I mentioned earlier, we don't know really what the future of AI looks like. It may well be that we need new ideas. And the question is then which system is best place to deliver that. Right now, it's far from clear to me. John LeCun recently left Metta. He's now setting up his startup in France. And so I don't think America can take for granted that it will lead in artificial intelligence just because it's saying that we're not going to regulate artificial intelligence at the same time. I don't think that the EU AI Act, those European approaches to regulation have no bearing on innovation. I think, you know, by most estimates, the GDPR has been harmful to smaller firms in particular. Larger firms have found it easier to offset compliance costs by capturing a larger share of the market. And you know, AI regulation could do the same. So your book was largely written before the election of President Trump. And you were pessimistic about the future of the United States even before the election of Donald Trump. So to what extent, not just his election, but his behavior in the first year in office made things worse. And is there any sort of positive sign that we say maybe is not as bad as we think? So to the extent that I pay attention to current events, I struggle to find any positive signs at the moment that have to tell you. So, you know, we mentioned earlier growing markets concentration across industries. And you could say, at least previously, that, well, you have still competition from other players in other countries. But now with trade barriers on the rise, that is no longer true either. In addition to this, you have this system of exemptions, which is easier for politically connected firms to navigate. That is probably going to have some impact on the kind of managers that we are being hired as well. We now have a lot of tech CEOs in Silicon Valley. If the future of these businesses is politics, well, you're going to get a different set of managers running their companies too. And it's going to be managers that are skilled at politics. It's probably going to have some spillovers there. I've been quite astonished by the degree of scientific funding is being cut. I haven't been surprised on immigration, but it's not working in favor of American innovation. I've been quite struck at how the rhetoric on cutting the administrative states and the actions there is actually diminishing American economy. The ability to regulate the capacity to build stuff. If you wanted to, for example, get rid of the internal revenue service, you would introduce a flat tax and you could get rid of the internal revenue services. If you cut the internal revenue service, then without reforming the tax code, you're just cutting the ability to collect taxes. And so if you want to get rid of the administrative apparatus, you start by cutting regulation, but that is not what's happening in the first instance either. So I'm puzzled on many fronts. If I would say something optimistic is that the United States has seen challenges before its resilient economy. It's been quite institutionally resilient through multiple crises, but I don't think that is a lot of course for celebration. Well, I'm not sure this podcast qualifies as uplifting, but it was incredibly interesting. So thank you so much for your time and for coming on. Yeah, indeed. Thank you very much, Carl. Thank you for having me. Really appreciate it. Particularly nice to be on a podcast you listen to yourself. If you're enjoying the discussions we're having on this program, there's another University of Chicago podcast network show you should check out. It's called The Pi. Economists are always talking about the pie, how it grows and shrinks, how it's sliced and who gets the biggest share. Join veteran MPR host Tess Vigland as she talks with leading economists about their cutting edge research and the key events of the day. Here, how the economic pie is at the heart of issues like the aftermath of a global pandemic, jobs, energy policy and so much more. The book is definitely very rich and very broad. Some of the facts are reminiscent of his previous book that was more focused on the fact of how basically incumbent elites don't want innovation. One of the stories that I think we repeat in both books is that one Roman emperor put to death an inventor that was trying to save labor. Because he said if I implement this technology, I'm going to have a lot of people unemployed. One of the important point we need to remember is that we give for granted today a culture of growth to use more gear, this year Nobel Prize awards. And the culture of growth is actually a product of Western civilization in the starting in the 17th century. We discuss this a bit with Beckert. At the beginning, if the world is your son, there is not a much of a cultural growth because what I make more, I subtract from you. I think that at some point, the Western nation first started to steal so much from the rest of the world that grew very much. But after that, the scientific revolution really increased the size of the pie and made all of a sudden possible to be much better off. And we give for granted that capitalism, scientific evolution and progress go hand in hand. But this is not obvious. And we have seen countries low down. We are seeing my own country of origin not growing productivity for 25 years in a row. So it is possible to stagnate. And it's not that easy to restart progress when you are in that equilibrium. I think that's what makes the argument that we should be putting conventional notions of progress aside because humanity has a lot, at least particularly people at the top end have a lot. And can our world tolerate continued growth if it means continued seizure of the world's natural resources? Do we all have to stop prioritizing growth in the way that we have in the past? Or maybe a better question is, do we equate growth and progress? Can you have progress without growth? Can you have one without the other? Do we say you can have both without consuming more resources that you can consume less resources? I think progress could be to produce the same quantity with much less input. And also progress is the creation of intangibles that are not necessarily finite, they don't consume resources. Think about new philosophy or new religions or new poetry. And I think that they don't necessarily consume resources, but they do benefit humankind. But in the traditional economists view, don't we equate progress and growth? In other words, is there a society that economists believe has made progress that has not shown growth? Do we need new measurements? New measurements will definitely help. But even with traditional measurement, we value a lot of intangibles. If you go to the theater in New York, you pay a lot of money to go to the theater, that is GDP. But has not produced any tangible thing, but is growth in some sense? Unless you show it by yourself and get a single seat at the last minute and then you don't pay as much. That's a new trick I've just discovered. It's very exciting anyway. But that aside. So one thing I was thinking about actually is that after our conversation we had with Danny Roderick, who pointed out the immense progress that China made on green energy due to the structure of its society. Does that challenge Karl Frey's view of the world? In other words, does whole-scale exploitation become exploration at some point, given that so many of the advances in green energy are being made by China? I don't know. I'm struggling to reconcile those two views. I.e., one Roderick's view that China is the one that has made most of the breakthroughs on the green energy front, because basically of this massive state-driven move with Karl Frey's view that what China excels at is exploitation, rather than exploration. I think we should bring a China expert to the show, because it's very difficult to really understand what's going on in China. Some people, actually most people have a very ideological view, either one way or another. So either they say that China is only able to copy, is not able to do anything, etc. I think that that's view is false. For example, now the self-riding car, I'm told, I'm not an expert, I'm told that the Chinese model is much more efficient than the one that Elon Musk invented. And in part of it is because they started with a different technology, but they had enormous return to scale in that technology, so now it's much cheaper. Yeah. I think there are examples like that that suggest that Roderick might be, I'm sorry, that Karl Frey might be underestimating China. I think so. I think that he's underestimating China. Now, I think the question that I was trying to get with him, which to me is a deep fundamental question, is historically there is no doubt that scientific innovation and intellectual freedom went hand in hand. Yes, we had a little spurt of technology innovation in the Soviet Union at a particular moment, mostly in military, but by and large, it was very difficult. And part of it is because if you sensor, like in the Soviet Union, where sensory all material written in English was very difficult to have a bureaucracy able to sort out whether the material was a political pamphlet or a scientific journal. Okay. Today is a piece of cake. With AI, you can automatically sort so that everything that is more technological oriented can filter through and everything that is vaguely politically oriented can be blocked. In China, they even learn how to block satire. So they know that Xi Jinping is equated to win in the pool. So anything that has anything to do with the pool is sensor in China. No question asked. So this ability is sought out. Unfortunately, because I would like to believe that the only way to achieve progress is to be free, is my separated two. And if they separate the two, then many of the things he's saying might not apply. Yeah. I think that might get at the fundamental issue we both have, that his book might be a wonderful history of the world as it was, but may not be a predictor of the world as it is going forward. Yeah. I think you summarized it perfectly. I love Frey's framework, but I think that we don't even understand, people don't even understand how progress comes about or how ideas come about. It's amorphous. And let me just give you an example. In the run up to the pandemic, everyone said it was utterly critical for people to have spaces where accidental congregation could take place because human interaction was the key to progress and to ideas becoming reality. And when the pandemic hit, all the companies that had been previously talking about how important their workplaces were suddenly said, it doesn't matter. We can continue to do all of the work we ever did without people getting together. And now we're back to that we need to get people together thing again. But I think what that suggests to me is that no one really knows. And some of this is a matter of belief. I like the idea that you need people to get together in order to create progress, that you need those happenstance moments because I like humanity and I like the idea of people interacting with other people. I don't like the idea of all of us being separate little atoms, but I admit that I'm biased. I bring my bias to that argument. I'm not sure anybody actually knows. What do you think, Luigi? Actually, country has this beautiful example of innovation going down when you shut down the bars during the prohibitionist era because people don't congregate and share information. So I think that there is definitely that element of congregation. And there is a reason why in every university they tend to subsidize coffee machines or places like this because then people congregate near the coffee machine and then you get to know your colleagues and interact and sometimes even good research spurs. And Carl Frey, to his credit, has this other beautiful example of a colleague or a woman who won an Nobel Prize that met the other guy she was doing research with at the photocopy machine in line for the photocopy machine. So I think that these congregations are important in breaking the silos in which we live. And it's an absolutely beautiful idea because when you're out at happy hour having fun with your friends, you are actually enabling creativity and progress. There you go. So that's your point. You're always working, right? Even at the happy hour, you're working. Exactly. You're being productive even when you think you're just having fun. So there. Capitalism is a podcast from the University of Chicago Podcast Network and the Stieglers Center in collaboration with the Chicago Booth Review. The show is produced by me, Matt Hodepp and Leah C. Zareen with production assistants from Utsoth Gandhi, Matt Lucky, Sebastian Berke, Andy Shee, and Brooke Fox. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. And if you'd like to take our conversation further, also check out promarket.org, a publication of the Stieglers Center, and subscribe to our newsletter. Sign up at chicagobooth.edu slash Stiegler to discover exciting new content, events, and insights. We hope you'll join our community again at chicagobooth.edu slash Stiegler.