Felix Hates Polls

By Felix Salmon of Slate Money

Sunday, October 17, 2021 8:10 AM EDT

Audio Length: 00:49:04

This week, Felix Salmon, Emily Peck and Stacy-Marie Ishmael talk about spoiled customers acting out, IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva and the scandal plaguing her job position, and a new poll finding that a third of households making less than $50,000 in the U.S. lost or spent their savings during the pandemic.

In the Plus segment: The Coinbase proposal for an entirely new regulation system for cryptocurrency.

Transcript:

S2: Hello and welcome to the Felix Hates Puls edition of Sleep Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I am Emily Peck of Sunrise. I am here with Stacy-Marie Ishmael of Bloomberg.

S3: Hello.

S2: And of course, I’m here with your host, your actual host. Felix Salmon, the hater of Pulse Felix.

S1: We are all hosts here.

S2: Emily Are you going to say your trademark greeting?

S1: Hello. Hello, everyone. We had to try and work out whether Emily could do that because I’m not going to call this the Felix eight supposed editions that would that would be like weirdly self-referential, but we are going to talk about me hating post.

S3: We are an Emily did a great job.

S2: We’re going to talk about Felix hating polls. We are going to talk about customers behaving very, very badly and try and figure out exactly why that is. We are going to talk about the drama at the IMF, which I initially thought was boring, but you’ll come to see is actually fascinating and highly political. We are going to talk about the survey thing, as I mentioned and am plus today, we’re getting into crypto again because now we have our resident expert, Stacey, who can tell us everything we need to know about Coinbase and regulation, all coming up on Slate’s money.

S1: So this week we had the JOLTS survey, which stands for something, something like labor turnover. Basically, it’s this big national official federal government survey which measures how many people are quitting their jobs. And in August, it was an absolute record. It was 2.9 percent of every single employed person in America quit their job in August. That’s an all time high. I did some mathematics. If you keep that level going for 12 months, it would be like 30 percent of all employed Americans would quit their jobs over the course of a year. Some of them more than once. And it seems like all of us have quit our jobs. I have never quit my actually. No, I have quit my job. I don’t quit my job very often, but it seems to be a very hot thing to do right now. And Emily, one of the reasons that people are quitting their jobs, especially in the service sector, is they can’t. They’re just like they’ve had it up to here with rude customers.

S2: Customers are out of control right now. Felix and Stacy, you’ve read the reports. People are and you’ve seen it in action. But I mean, people are attack physically assaulting restaurant workers or retail workers who are just trying to enforce mask rules. They’re getting very impatient, just yelling at service workers, just making their lives miserable. I have my sister in law works in a customer facing business, and she’s just like every day I just destroyed by just the rudeness and the hurt, just horrendous customer behavior. And it’s actually, I think, pushing some restaurant workers even farther to the brink and to quit their jobs.

S1: And not just restaurant workers, anyone who works like on airlines or basically anyone customer facing. And yeah, what is what is the explanation? Because I don’t think it’s just anti-maskers.

S2: Well, I don’t know. I think I think people are just angry. They’ve been isolated. We live in a confusing moment in time where, you know, the old ways are gone and the new ways are weird and still unsafe. We live in this uncertain moment. I think that plays a role in it. People’s emotions are kind of on edge. I think is part of it. Also, I think there is a legitimate labor shortage. So when you go to a restaurant or a cafe or anywhere these days, the lines are longer. It’s harder. You don’t get that instant service that you used to pre-pandemic, like things do take longer and that always has piss people off. Like time immemorial, we’ve all been on like a supermarket line and felt like what? Like, why does that person have so much stuff on the conveyor? I don’t understand.

S3: Don’t worry, the supply chain crisis means no one will have any stone in

S2: the supply chain crisis. There’s just so much

S3: you remember a couple of months ago when we talked about the pandemic of rage. Yes, he like this is this is very much right because a lot of stuff is going on. But this is such a continuation of that. I was I remember being in an airport which is already even on the best of times, like not the funnest place to be on hold with JetBlue for like the fourth hour to try to get a flight changed for another thing that I was going to learn not watching a woman scream at the top of her lungs at a gate agent because she got to the gate sort of five minutes after the daytime was closed and having everybody there just trying to navigate between, I’m going to bury myself and my noise canceling headphones. Or is this woman going to get arrested or do we need to rescue that gate agent? And it just really, to me, was like almost a comical example of the kinds of strains that folks are under. Where, to your point, Emily there’s there’s been so much complexity that people need addressed in their lives that the lack of customer service is making it worse. And that lack of customer service is leading to people yelling at the last remaining agents. So then they leave and you have this kind of vicious cycle of no one feeling in control of what’s going on.

S1: One thing that’s definitely happening is that people are paying more money for worse service. Yeah. And this is this is basically what Emily was talking about. Like, you know, because it’s hard to because of labor shortages and because a bunch of people who knew how to do certain jobs and had been in there, been in those jobs for years lost those jobs during the pandemic. Now you have very green people coming in and who, you know, don’t have institutional knowledge. You don’t really know how to do their jobs very well. There aren’t as many of them as they used to be, so the quality of the service has gone down from what people remember pre-pandemic. The same time, the amount you needing to pay these people has gone up, so those costs get passed through to customers. So people are finding that combination of worse service with higher cost incredibly aggravating. Now that, of course, does not excuse or even really necessarily explain the sort of outbursts of anger. I always thought of America as being like this sort of passive aggressive kind of place where people would smile to your face. California, maybe. Maybe that’s up to California, maybe. But yeah, the idea that like when faced with this. Bad service. Your reaction is going to be anger that. Yeah, I think that’s just like pent up frustrations from the pandemic.

S2: I also think there’s something going on here where that does kind of tie back to the supply chain and all the disruptions in the economy that we’re now working through. American consumers are like the most spoiled, just brats on the planet, like you’re used to getting really good customer service for like dirt cheap, right? Like restaurant workers have always been kind of mistreated, underpaid, harassed. It’s worse now, for sure, but that’s always been true. But now the service that you were paying almost nothing for isn’t as good anymore, and I think there is the supply chains are disrupted. It’s harder to get this. It’s harder to get that. There’s this element of just like spoiled children and having tantrums because they’re not getting their super cheap, fancy lifestyles seamlessly frictionless Lee supported in the way they used to. Maybe.

S1: Yeah, I just have this idea, right? Like any American who visits Paris, right is going to experience bad service and high prices, but that doesn’t cause them to, like, go postal. It’s something about like it happening in your local suburb that makes it much more annoying. I mean,

S3: I also think I mean one, the U.S. is the place that had four very unfortunate historical reasons the originating of the phrase going postal. But I also think the past four to six years of rhetoric have been really inflammatory and really poisonous. And you know, various of my friends who study political communication or who study general public health communication have been saying that the normalization of just like insults from, you know, politicians, from people and sort of what we’re supposedly non-political positions of power does have effects where if you think that the way to get what you want is to insult someone or threaten violence or actually engage in violence and to generally see that there are fewer and fewer repercussions without like, that’s a non-trivial contributor to this kind of environment.

S1: One thing I want to talk about a little bit is the wave of cancellations the Southwest Airlines suffered this week, which there’s an enormous amount of debate about whether or not it may or may not have had something to do with vaccine mandates. But I think underlying it was this just general being stretched and extreme frustration among the workforce like they were so stressed and at the end of their rope as it were like whatever tiny thing it was that caused it or big thing like, I don’t want to say one way or another, whether the vaccine mandate was was the cause, but like the whole thing, just fell apart and they had to cancel, like 2000 flights.

S2: I mean, that’s what we’re seeing with sort of everything. I listen to the daily today about supply chains and the economy is in this like just used to be run on this kind of just in time model. Everything was so well calibrated, but you throw it off just a little bit and it all kind of falls apart. Is that part of what happens with an airline like Southwest? Like, there’s no there’s no like backup plans.

S1: One Southwest is built on a model of extreme efficiency. That’s the way they can be. Cheap is by being efficient and efficiency breaks very easily. It’s not robust compared to inefficiency, inefficiency you can throw at it, and it will keep on going. Whereas efficiency is much more fragile. And I think we’re seeing that.

S2: Yeah, and every and every corner, I think now the efficient way of things round before is not sustained is not sustainable. It doesn’t doesn’t hold up to pressures, to pandemics, to vaccine mandates.

S3: Apparently, we were willing to put up with that so-called efficiency in airlines by which they meant higher fees because they don’t even want you to, like, bring carry-on luggage because that’s inefficient and it takes longer to load to, you know, just all of these restrictions. And now you’re still faced with those restrictions and your flight is late and it’s more expensive to fly. You know, so from a consumer psychology perspective, it just like there’s no upside to anything, is kind of the vibe that’s out there.

S1: One of the things I’ve seen reported is the luxury hotels have started overriding their sophisticated pricing algorithms. Most hotels these days have computers, which basically tell them how much to charge for any given room at any given time, and the algorithms are perfectly optimized to maximize revenue. And there’s so much demand for hotels right now that what you have. These like high end hotels that would normally be charging, say, three hundred and fifty dollars a night, suddenly the computer was spitting out like $950 a night. And there’s demand at nine hundred and fifty dollars a night and people willing to pay it. But the hotel is basically saying, we can’t do that. We can deliver $350 worth of like value. There’s no way we can deliver a $950 a night experience. You’re going to be disappointed in your stay if you come here and spend that much. So we’re just going to sell out much lower prices than we could, you know, theoretically.

S2: That’s interesting.

S3: But I like that as well. You know, I’m sure if

S2: the housing market like that, like some houses shouldn’t be to lose like this

S3: argument that doesn’t have like a fridge or a washing machine or a closet, it’s still $4000 a month.

S2: Sorry, no, no shame.

S3: Their landlords are not luxury hotel owners, that’s for sure. It does.

S2: It does seem like all consumer products and services now, and the way those experiences are structured and priced, it’s all feels very up in the air at the moment. It feels like we’re in a new kind of economy.

S3: Well, the last two grand opening embers of capitalism was, I don’t

S2: know, maybe we’re headed toward something more sustainable or something. Or maybe it’s time to pause and be like, Do I need that book overnight?

S1: I mean, I can’t get a loan from an auto Emily.

S2: Can I be a little optimistic? I mean, maybe something good comes of it.

S1: I know I like it, I’m glad Emily is going to be optimistic

S2: just for this segment. I mean, I don’t know.

S1: I have a special announcement for you today. This year is the 25th anniversary of Slate. I remember when I started reading Slate 25 years ago, and it was a weekly magazine. This is by Michael Kinsley that was published by Microsoft, and you could print it out in Microsoft Word with page numbers at the bottom every week. It has come a long way for there. It has come a long way from there and to celebrate all of its various iterations and what it has become. We are offering the annual Slate Plus membership at $25 off now. Remember, you will get all of our Sleep Plus segments, which are amazing. You got no ads on any of the podcasts and you get unlimited access to Slate dot com. Believe it or not, Slate Bogus has been going for a large chunk of those 25 years Slate Money has been going for. Well, I’ve had. Let’s just put it this way I’ve had three different jobs since late money started. So sign up for Slate Plus at Slate dot com slash money plus to keep us going for another 25 years. Again, that’s twenty five dollars of an annual membership through October 31. So between now and the end of the month, sign up at Slate dot com slash money plus.

S3: Well, are we optimistic about the IMF?

S1: Oh my God. Yeah, we talk about the IMF. The IMF is like so I was running down the list of IMF managing director scandals. And, you know, since 2000 we had I mean, Stacy, do you remember Horst Koehler? Like, No, no, no, no, I don’t. He quit. He quit as IMF managing director to become president of Germany, which is a job that most people don’t even realize exists. And then he quit as president of Germany because, you know, he there was some major scandal about what he said about German troops in Afghanistan or something like that. But then we had Rodrigo de Rato, who changed his name to Rodrigo Rato when he moved back to Spain, joined the board of a bank, embezzled a bunch of money and wound up getting sentenced to prison for four and a half years. And then we had DSK.

S3: Oh yeah, that I remember.

S1: And so we remember what happened to DSK. He got arrested in New York on like sexual assault charges. He managed to sort of wiggle out of those ones and then he got arrested in France. I love this phrase aggravated pimping judges where he would basically organize these sordid sex parties. And really, the IMF managing director is it’s a job that is highly political and it seems to attract sort of skeevy men who fall down in unfortunate manner. And then they realize that the way to solve this problem was to hire a woman instead. And so they hired Christine Lagarde, who was awesome. Eventually, she left to become the European Central Bank chief. And so they said, Well, let’s keep on doing this, and they hired this woman, Kristalina Georgieva. And now she has held on by the skin of her teeth. The job in another scandal like this is just the most scandal prone job, and I am convinced that this really has damaged the IMF like this scandal in particular. And all of these scandals in aggregate have basically just meant that the IMF has not been there when the world needed it most.

S2: And should you explain what the scandal is, I mean, as far as I can tell. Kristalina doctored some report to make China’s ranking look a little bit better, and it’s sad because the ranking already was like 78 and it moved to like 75, like the particulars of the scandal

S1: and kept it at 78. So OK, so Kristalina géographique before she took over the IMF was this other job you’ve never heard of, called CEO of the World Bank, which is sort of not the CEO in any real sense, that’s the World Bank president. But there’s this other job they gave her the year, and as CEO of the World Bank, she was somewhat responsible for this silly thing that the World Bank puts out called the EU. Like the doing business rankings rank every country in the world, which

S3: every country that is considered an emerging market is obsessed with.

S1: And it’s like the idea if you look at a bunch, you survey a bunch of people we’re going to talk about like the uselessness of surveys in the next segment. But you survey a bunch of people and say, how easy is it to do business in X Y Z country? And then you rank all the countries on how easy it is to open a business and that kind of thing. This all goes back to Ananda de Soto and his idea of, like, you know, economies, the successful, if normal people can open businesses easily. And they did this survey, Cheyna got exactly the same number of points as it had done the previous year, but other countries got more points than they had done the previous year. So that meant that Cheyna was going to go down in the rankings from like seventy eight to eighty five. And then apparently no one wanted to piss off the Chinese, and so they massage some of the numbers so that it went back up to seventy eight again. The IMF is a deeply political organization. This is the World Bank, I should say, because this is the World Bank, it’s a deeply political organization. And this came as a surprise to absolutely no one, right? This reminded me very much of the scandal over when Henry Blodget was caught giving higher ratings to investment banking clients. If everyone knew that was what was going on and everyone just kind of accepted it, and then just

S3: one day back in time out to acknowledge that you managed to tie the scandal back to Henry Blodget. But that is a leap I would not have anticipated. Please carry on.

S1: But yeah, it was just it’s one of those things which everyone knew about. And then suddenly someone came out first, like Eliot Spitzer in the case of Henry Blodget or David Malpass in the case of the World Bank, and said saying This is terrible, this is a scandal. And then everyone had to pretend to be shocked and scandalized by something that everyone knew that had been going on all along. And so there was this massive law firm report and there was like, you know, thousands of millions of documents, the millions of dollars spent on reports. And yeah, and then eventually it reached the level of the IMF board because they’re now the employer of Georgieva and they’re like, Can we even have you running the IMF, if you would do such a terrible thing is to massage China’s position and doing business rankings to which the Europeans, the Chinese, the Russians, the Brits all said, Dude, there’s no there’s nothing there. What the hell? This is some dumb witch hunt from David Malpass and said, no, she should keep her job. The Americans, for reasons I don’t understand, were like, No, she has to leave. And then the Americans lost. It’s very rare for the Americans to lose in this context. So.

S3: Mike, Mike, big question back to all of this is and it sort of feels very much like the conversation that we’re having about the perception of the U.S. in the world is like, why does anyone care just

S1: about the IMF about scandal?

S3: I think about the scandal. Right? I understand from the perspective of a person from a region that has had various types of fractious relationships with the IMF. But is the is the idea that her doing something very political that is very much in line with the kinds of things you expect people in those positions to do going to nefariously affect her performance of the IMF in a way that, you know, somehow everyone was chill with DSK as actual bad behavior.

S1: Yeah, I mean, this is exactly right. So the job of IMF managing director is a job of like herding political cats, right? You have a bunch of permanent board members. There’s no other board of directors quite like the IMF and World Bank boards of directors where they literally have offices in the building and they come in work every day and they’re breathing down your neck every day. And your job as the executive is basically to manage up even more than it is to manage down, you need to make sure that you have you can keep the board cohesive and on the same page. And so it’s a deeply, deeply political job. And the idea that you’re going to be sort of. Agnostic. You’re going to be like arm’s length removed from any kind of political decision is ridiculous. And I have to give huge credit to Bloomberg on this story because in the middle of this whole thing, Bloomberg came out and said, You do realize that David Malpass, who is the current Trump nominated president of the World Bank, he did exactly the same thing with China’s ranking, except for he pushed to move it down instead of up because he’s like this anti-China. You know, that’s the only thing he cares about basically is like, I don’t like China. So like, but you know, that wasn’t the investigation his, you know, he kind of asked for this investigation of Georgieva, so his name never appears in the report. He now seems to be safe as well. But yeah, I like the idea that these deeply political multilateral institutions aren’t deeply political. Multilateral institutions seems to be completely insane, of course, there.

S2: So the mistake she made wasn’t exactly monkeying with the rankings, which is something everyone kind of does. It’s the mistake is that she didn’t do it in a way that was OK politically. She did something that pissed someone off politically right.

S3: Which is also years later, all political spats happened, right? Like somebody in power has the ability to make somebody else’s life in power miserable. I mean, there was actual fallout from this, right? Because as far as I can tell, like the World Bank has just stopped publishing the doing business.

S1: Yeah, and that’s the only good outcome here.

S3: So as far as you’re concerned, they shouldn’t publish this report and

S1: this is this this is a dumb report and it should never been published and it made no sense and it was empirically extremely dubious and like the fact that they’re no longer publishing this dubious pseudoscientific report on which, like multi-billion dollar decisions were made has to be a good thing.

S2: Wait, that’s what I was going to ask you. What’s the what was the report used for? Speaking of multibillion dollar decisions, what were the decisions?

S3: The report would inform things like, you know, oh, the perception of this country is that it’s too hard to do business there. So like some CFO, somewhere would be like, we’re going to domicile one of our factories in some other place. And there are also, if I

S1: may, I mean like that, you know, in terms of private sector decisions. Yeah, maybe kind of. Maybe not, but definitely in terms of like the IFC in the World Bank, which of these, you know, public sector institutions, they would this they would like pressure countries to increase their scores, and if they didn’t increase their scores, they wouldn’t get certain types of loans and stuff like that from the World Bank.

S2: I mean, it is hard to do business in China, right? I know that because I

S1: just need to know the right people. I mean, you remember that great episode we had with you when you went on, she was like explaining how how that works and how it works in a very different way from the way in which, you know, doing business in Canada works right. So like. And that’s one of the reasons why this whole report is kind of silly, right? Because it it’s really impossible to compare those two experiences on a sort of single yardstick.

S2: So now she Kristalina Georgieva is going to keep her her job, but is going to be ineffective in it. Is that the consensus?

S1: So I think she’s definitely weakened, right? The Hope like you can’t do anything at the IMF without the support of the U.S. and the U.S. kind of clearly doesn’t really. She doesn’t really have the US behind her anymore. So, you know, given that most of the world is really struggling still to. Get back in to recover from the pandemic. We really need the IMF and the World Bank to be stronger than ever to make sure that the rest of the global south basically catches up with the West in terms of India vaccination and economic growth, and you need the World Bank and the IMF for that and that both weak now, you know. Gayle Geva has been weakened by this. No one likes Malpass at the World Bank. You know, this is just deeply unfortunate. I think if if they had been more powerful. Kovacs, for one, might have been much more successful than it was.

S3: Oh, Kovacs.

S2: Is this a failure of gender essential essentialism when you were setting up this story, Felix, you said something like, well, Christine Lagarde was great. They tried a woman that works. So now they’re just going to put another woman in there because women do this better. And it seems like that is not correct. Well, so just a reminder that that is ridiculous tokenism.

S3: I was that was just going to say that tokenism is not a great way to try to run your organization in any context.

S2: Yeah. Like I’m all for women getting these roles, but not simply

S1: interesting to me. Like she was, she was not generally regarded as the frontrunner to get the job. She kind of came out of nowhere because she was considered more of a technocrat and less of a politician. Right, like the front runners to get the job where European politicians rather than like some World Bank, you know, technocrat.

S3: And to your earlier point, Felix like political canny is such a key part of this gig.

S1: Let’s stick on this subject of dubious polls. Stacey, you wanted to talk about why dubious Felix.

S3: Wow. So there was a story that I found interesting about, which is based on a poll that something like 20 percent of U.S. households had lost or spent through their entire savings during COVID. And this is, I mean, read it. It’s based on a poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H.. Chan, as in Zuckerberg and Chan School of Public Health, found that in this the sample, most of the households making less than $50000 had their entire financial cushion wiped out, or a third of households making less than $50000 had their entire financial cushion wiped out. And when I said this story is Felix, he was like, Oh my God, I hate this very so much, partly because you hate polls, but also why? Please explain to our audience why it is. You have such a reaction.

S1: OK, so, so many reasons why I hate this story. Let’s start with this idea that polls are presumptively more better. I don’t know like to you that, you know, very grammatical term if you attach a bunch of grand names to them, like Harvard and NPR and then always the Harvard poll, it must be good. No polls, the polls and the first thing you want to look at is like how many people about why? I think it was about three thousand on this one. It was not a huge number of people. And so you can get like a little bit of a vague idea of what’s going on from polling three thousand people. But you don’t sort of like reconceptualize your entire view of what happened during the pandemic on that basis. Second thing is, polls are only useful long. It’s usually like a single poll tells you nothing. In order for a poll to tell you anything at all, you need to run it on a regular basis every week, month, year, whatever it is. And then what you can do is you can say, Well, I can compare this number to where it was in the past, and it’s gone up a lot or gone down low. So what we would need in order for this poll to mean something would be for this poll to have been run in many years past and specifically in pre-pandemic years. And you do the same thing and you ask people who earn less than $50000 a year like, you know, did you lose all of your savings over the past six months? And then that gives you a baseline to be able to tell whether this number is high or low? And then the third thing which is definitely worth talking about here is that the Federal Reserve does not do a poll. It does this well. It’s a kind of a hobby of consumer. It’s literally called a survey survey of consumer finances, but it’s based on actual data. It’s not based based on self-reporting. And every single data point we have about the wealth of poor Americans over the course of the pandemic says that it has gone up by an unprecedented amount of money that rich people got richer by a certain percentage, poor people got richer by an even larger percentage. Now are there people whose savings were wiped out? Sure, in like every demographic group, I’m sure there are. But the overall story that we know from quantitative data, you know, banks from the Federal Reserve and so on and so forth is the wealth has gone up and not down so suddenly to take this poll. And remember, this is a poll, a broad poll of Americans generally, right? So the n the number of people you’re actually measuring who are earning less than $50000 is not 3000. Just one thousand I didn’t see couldn’t didn’t look at the cross tabs, so I couldn’t work out how many it was. But it’s a relatively small subset of that number. And you’re asking them to self-report something like people are notoriously terrible, self-reporting financial anything. So for all of these reasons, I, you know, I feel like basing some sort of, you know, massive headline about what happened to poor people over the course of the pandemic on this kind of flimsy basis is weak A-F.

S3: And that is how Felix really feels.

S2: So Mike, drop this story.

S3: I will say here is what I will say. In addition to all of those things, I do think that we are about to have a real problem with data for the next couple of years. One, because of all the things that we know about, like recency bias. You see this in the conversations about people being like working from home is the best thing ever or the worst thing ever, based entirely on the pandemic as an experience. You’re seeing conversations about the 2020 census. There were some interesting headlines about the difficulty of data collection about how the response rates may have been affected by, you know, the screaming for what felt like weeks about whether you’re going to have to declare your citizenship. Status on the census, and I am just generally quite worried actually about how and whether we are going to be positioned societally, politically, financially to be making policy decisions when there are all sorts of questions about like what are we, what do we really have to go on? That’s robust, given just the sort of upheaval of the past couple of years.

S2: We talked about this a while ago because Felix wrote about the unemployment was that the unemployment numbers the survey used there and how it’s become harder to do and less reliable.

S1: Right? I mean, so the ones the one set of surveys that I the is way more reliable than most is the official government surveys from places like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the Federal Reserve and so on. Those have those survey like orders of magnitude more people. They’re incredibly robust. And you know, they. And they also are time series that go back as far as you want them to go back and you can call them up on Fred. And you know, they they have problems. They have many fewer problems than like some random one off poll that you get sent in the press release. But yeah, my point was that especially at the height of the pandemic and especially for polls which involve like which historically involved like sitting down with people and meeting them in person, a lot of the quality of that data really deteriorated significantly. And I think it’s coming back now. But yeah, I think we we, you know, polls in general have become less reliable. People have become less willing to answer pollsters questions. There’s just a huge number of Americans who just don’t answer polls at all anymore. And there’s no particular reason to believe that the people who do on the polls are representative of the people who don’t answer polls.

S3: So spaghetti monster religion situation?

S1: Exactly.

S2: I mean, polls aren’t that great anyway. People will tell you one thing and like you just said, they’ll tell you one thing and then their actual behavior is completely different.

S1: And there’s no it’s not even that they’re lying. Like, I remember I remember vividly a poll in the UK after the 1997 general election where they came out. I think it was like a week and a half or two weeks after the election and said, who did you vote for in the election? And like 50 percent more people said they’d voted for Labor than had actually voted for Labor like people. And it wasn’t even that they were less people. Like there was this huge, like you say, if you remember this, this huge like moment of joy, New Britain, New Labour, Tony Blair and people like Tony Blair. This is so long ago that it was like such

S3: a long time

S1: and everyone got so caught up in how wonderful Tony Blair was that they genuinely believed that they had voted for him, even if they hadn’t,

S3: even if they hadn’t voted at all, like they somehow somehow channeled their frothiness into polling.

S2: I mean, data collection is so much more easy now robust. There’s so much information you can get. Oh, isn’t there? That would make render polls a little yet less necessary,

S1: but one of the things that drives me up the wall and dear. Fintech PR people, if you’re listening to this, like, for instance, last week there was this huge report that came out from Plaid about consumer adoption of fintech and how many apps people have on their phone, and it was it was very large and it was based on a poll of like 2000 people, and they just literally phoned up people and said, How many apps do you have on your phone? And I’m like, your plan. You sit at the center of this. You have data on this. Why are you doing a poll to find out what you already know? And I get this from company after company, after a company like Fidelity Charitable will send me a poll telling me how much money people are giving to charity. I might. You are fidelity to these customers. They are giving money to charity. That’s what they tell me, how much they give you. Use your own data for some reason, which I don’t understand. They keep on doing these polls rather than just sharing their data.

S2: Maybe it’s easier to do the polls than to figure out their own data, or they’re embarrassed about their data. Write in and tell us.

S3: My last comment on this is something that Paul Murphy used to say. Paul Murphy is and still are the FDA. And he said, You know, nobody ever needs a survey of investor sentiment. You just look at the stock market and, you know, like, we have all sorts of interesting primary residuals. But I think the problem for a lot of policy is a lot of the policymaking has been based on self-reporting. And so if self-reporting is getting less and less robust, I hope that we are rapidly thinking about better alternatives agreed.

S1: If you have any better alternatives to polls, please send them in state money at Slate.com. I think it’s time for a numbers round. I am going to stop 87 percent because like having said, the polls are terrible, I’m going to. I feel like I need to segway from polls that terrible into a poll number, which is this is a poll of now brand teens, the

S3: most reliable demographic for cell.

S1: They found 10000. This is a huge end. And then they only polled teens only poll people between the ages of 13 and 19, and 87 percent of them have an iPhone.

S2: I cannot believe your number is a poll results after you just spent 10 minutes. 15. I don’t know. Telling me not to take, not to pay attention to polls or believe them, or that they’re worthless. So I mean, Felix, you have to elaborate a little more here. You have to really sell this to me that why does this matter? Is it real?

S1: Come on consiste good for Apple in little mind. I’m done.

S2: Oh my word. It’s believable that I believe that the teens have iPhones. My kids have iPhones.

S1: This is obviously much, much higher than iPhone penetration more broadly and certainly iPhone penetration nationally. Yeah, the kids these days and you know, one of the things that has been fascinating to me, you know, looking at the stock market is why is it that Apple is trading on the p e ratio of 28 when, like the New York Times, is trading on a PE ratio of 65? Right? Let. Apple obviously has a bright future.

S2: I think you just lose last, Stacy completely.

S3: Listen. Okay, carry on. Tell me, tell me again about how the teens are insufficiently represented in the p e ratios of Apple as it relates to the New York Times.

S1: Yeah, I mean, something like that. I haven’t really thought this one through, but I do think I do think that if your big picture view of Apple is, this is a stock that his massively undervalued. If you’ve just kept that view for the past 25 years like that, you have basically been right all along and I and I don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t still be right on that one. It does strike me if you look at the valuations of other companies that are perfectly good companies, but like Apple, just look so much cheaper in comparison, given how strong its brand is, especially with late. And I’m going to say something very profound here, but I believe the children are our future.

S3: On that note, I wouldn’t share my number, which is not about children. I suppose it’s about the future. It’s twenty five point four million. Which is how much Banksy’s shredded painting Love is in the bin, fetched at auction, according to Sotheby’s and Felix can write an entire book about why auction prizes are garbage via

S1: auction prizes, a great love for the only transparent prices in the entire world.

S3: But yeah, twenty five point four million for a piece that was shredded and now sort of hangs in a really interesting way where half of it is sort of out of the frame and a top half is in the frame and and and it’s one of his more famous prints. It’s like the little girl looking up at a red balloon that shaped like a heart.

S2: Oh, well, that makes more sense to me than like than monkey NAFTA going around today that sold.

S1: Yeah, I mean, bye bye bye. NAFTA standards is

S3: a bargain, frankly. I mean, I give Banksy five minutes before he comes out with some kind of NFT art situation. So yeah. Banksy, if you’re listening, I want to break that story. Call me

S1: Emily.

S2: So my number is $19 and 96 cents. OK. That is the cost of four boxes of Cask Italy, which is the new pasta invented by Dan Pashman, who hosts the Sporkful podcast. He’s been mentioned on other Slate podcast forecasts.

S1: Yeah, he invented the pasta.

S2: He had four episodes on his podcast, The Sporkful, in which he set out to invent a new pasta shape. And he, like he travels to North Dakota, where they make the semolina. He gets a guy, I think, in either New Jersey or Italy to make the dye. You know that the pasta gets extruded in, and he comes up with its new shape called Cask Italia, which kind of means little waterfalls. It’s a brilliant marketing. He didn’t mean for it to be a brilliant marketing strategy, but it for sure was because you listen to the four episodes called Mission Impossible. And when you finish and when you finish, you’re like, I must have the pasta and you go immediately to buy it. This is what happened to me, and I’m late to this very late. And you buy the pasta and it’s four boxes of pasta, one pound each, and it’s $19 and 96 cents, and it’s sold out like immediately. He’s on his bajillion, you know, production run, and now it soon will be available in stores. Me and my daughter listen to the podcast. We’re obsessed with the pasta. Honestly, is it that good? Is it? I mean, it’s it’s really good, but you know, it’s really good. It’s I would love, I would love for you guys, which I would love for Felix to try it.

S1: I will try it. But also because I live with my head in the clouds, like, is that cheap? Is it expensive? Oh no, it’s really expensive.

S2: And of. Oh, it’s bananas. Expensive, a pound of pasta. If you go to your local supermarket, which maybe you don’t. I don’t know. You get a pound of pasta or

S1: as my local supermarket less Italy. And so I have very year. Oh, OK.

S2: Yeah, you’re just not a normal person. But yeah, that’s bananas expensive for pasta. Like, I mean, it’s worth it if you listen to the podcast and he uses the producer, everything’s very small and artisanal and blah blah blah blah blah. But like, yeah, you can get a box runs only for like sixty nine cents. So even in these times. But yeah, but it was fun. It was like a whole experience. I recommend it first. Listen to the podcast, then buy the pasta.

S1: First of all, I will listen to the podcast.

S3: We’re going to throw a Slate Money Dinner Party with Classic Italy is the center.

S1: Yeah, no frills.

S3: Yeah, invite Banksy.

S2: Banksy if you’re listening to late money

S3: Cleveland, you’re out of the other

S1: party going back. Yeah, launch your NFT at this late money caskets early dinner party. That was a sentence that has

S3: never been suddenly

S1: OK. I think that’s it. Thank you so much for listening to late money this week. The Slate Money Succession podcast kicks off for reals on Monday, with the one and only Janine Gibson. We are recapping season three, episode one. There will be swearing. It’s awesome. So tune in for that. Which, just like Slate Money itself, is produced by the awesome Shannon Roth. And you also need to be nice to us on the podcast raising thing. I mean, to say that give us lots of stuff. Anyway, we will be back on Monday with Slate Monday Succession and on Saturday with regular state money. See you then! Stacey, I know what we can talk about since since you’re the crypto queen. What the utterly bonkers, crazy proposal that Coinbase put out this week saying, you know what? FCC, CFTC, CC, Federal Reserve does. You can all go fuck yourself, basically. We want an entirely new regulator just because with that, special snowflakes. Sure, let’s do it. What were they thinking?

S3: I don’t know if it’s genuinely that unusual, given the self-confidence of the participants in the cryptocurrency industry at large. Just as a little bit of backdrop, Coinbase, which is a publicly traded major company, it’s an exchange. It’s one of the ones that if you have encountered crypto in a retail context, you’ve probably signed up for a Coinbase Wallet or Coinbase Pro. And when they were targeted by the FCC who said, Hey, we have a lot of questions, formal questions about some of the products that you are proposing here. Their CEO Brian Armstrong, went on Twitter and essentially it was like, How dare you try to regulate me? My guy, Gensler. And that really struck a nerve with various other folks in crypto. And I think in Wall Street more broadly about, you know, in 2021, do we need to think about regulation in a different way? Now we could have had this conversation 15 years ago and, you know, said people on Wall Street and whatever the hot asset class of the time wants to be regulated a different way. But what Coinbase followed up with was a full what they’re calling a digital asset policy proposal, which they posted on GitHub. For anyone to read, we’ll put a link to it in the show notes, and

S1: they also posted, It’s just a PDF. You can post it on your website. You can put on your website.

S3: Yes. But you know, it’s like tech credibility, but it on GitHub in a guest. They also had an op ed in The Wall Street Journal, and at the core of it is this idea that crypto, because it is so new and so special, should be regulated by something equally new and special and not subject to the pre-existing domains of other regulators in the U.S.,

S1: which, by the way, makes no sense. Because like, if you know, I remember I talked to the Coinbase chief policy officer about this, and I say, So what happens when Coinbase starts trading digital versions of U.S. equities, which I’m sure is on their roadmap? You know, like if you are regulated by some special digital regulator, does that mean that the SEC is no longer in charge of like equities trading? And it’s like, yeah, I don’t know. Like, he actually went on the record to me that basically say, I have no idea how any of that would work. And meanwhile, the biggest crypto exchange, or possibly the second biggest crypto exchange in the world. FTX came out on the same day with a much more sensible blog post where it basically just said, Yeah, like CFTC, SEC. They’re more or less moving in the right direction. Let’s kind of evolve these existing regulators in the way that regulation has always evolved to encompass crypto and things digital, and we can move in the right direction at a sensible pace. And and it just seemed so like based in the real world rather than this. Shots fired from Coinbase, which basically looked it, looked like them deliberately antagonizing Gary Gensler at the SEC as much as they possibly could.

S3: I think there is a there are personality differences between the various players in the crypto space. I mean, so a16z, which has one of the largest dedicated crypto funds of its ilk, has a policy team headed by people with very serious legal and regulatory credentials. And they also came out with, Hey, you know, here’s why. Here’s how we think this could work, right? So I think there is sort of a spectrum of what you’re describing, which I would say that Coinbase is at the sort of the most radical and of proposing something entirely new, entirely bespoke and entirely for them. And then FTX sort of embracing, OK, what we’re looking for here is clarity. You know, the phrase that they use in the in the blog post is there’s general consensus as to what we need. And then you have like various other players somewhere in between those two, those two extremes.

S2: It seems like just marketing on Coinbase is from Coinbase because they’re basically they’re trying to look like they want to be regulated while at the same time proposing something that’s pretty unrealistic and not supported by logic.

S1: They want to look like they don’t want to be regulated by any of the existing regulators. So in that sense, they’re appealing to the Lazarides crowd, you know, of like, burn it all down. This is a whole new. Techno utopian New World, which has nothing to do with the existing world, which you’re never going to find the regulator who will embrace that vision.

S2: It just sounds like a distraction, like when Facebook is like, well, gee, if only someone would come along and like, regulate us and help us, we. It’s not us. It’s you like, it’s kind of like that. None of what exists to

S1: exert oversight board. And they’re like, Why don’t you tell us what to do? Oversight Board that we set up that way. We don’t make the decision. Yeah, yeah.

S2: It’s kind of like that. I think it’s like, we really do want the help. We just nothing quite works yet. So let’s make something work. And that could take like forever.

S1: And of course, naturally, the Coinbase proposal includes a brand new s o self-regulating organization where all of the crypto companies would come together and regulate themselves. Yeah. Yeah. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, and by the way, it says nothing about what you know, DeFi Dex is all of this stuff, like if there’s just an exchange which is just a protocol and not a company, whether and how that gets regulated is nowhere to be found. There’s so many things that are nowhere to be found in the Coinbase proposal, including things like KYC and taxes and all manner of other stuff.

S3: Well, I think most V1 of policy is never the final draft.

S1: Right, right. And so I do think this is an. Overton window situation, right?

S3: I think we are at the beginning stages. You know, I think it was like a week or so ago. Bloomberg reported that the the Biden White House is considering an executive order on cryptocurrencies. Three days ago, the Bank of England was out there making statements about the need to regulate cryptocurrencies. Mexico has also come out with statements this week. I think that there is a tremendous about amount of noise, some more signaling, some more noisy and very few concrete actions. Unless you, you know, you think about Cheyna, which was just like, nope, straight banned. And in an environment like that, the cryptocurrency, you know, the biggest players are trying to create clarity. Some of them are doing it in more radical ways. But I don’t think it’s I don’t think the act of attempting to create clarity is that unusual. But I do think is more unusual is like the tenor and the approach and the were burned every bridge with the folks who may ultimately regulate you, right?

S1: So Stacey, let’s finish this segment with a prediction from you. When is the long awaited Federal Reserve report on central bank digital currency is going to come out and how many pages is it going to be when it gets?

S3: If I can answer that question, I would write a story about it. But but you know, I think that the sooner that that can come out and start answering some of these questions and like let the army of lawyers who are absolutely chomping at the bit to start billing everyone involved. I think the better

S1: I’m going to say next week and. Two hundred.

S2: Can I actually ask another question, I know you’re trying to end this, but I won’t. Yeah, sure. What agency should regulate crypto? Because I believe there’s some disagreement because is it is if it’s money, it’s one regulator. If it’s equity, you know, it’s the S.E.C. like, who should do it?

S1: We really should do it. Good question. OK, so right now, at the moment, it is mostly regulated by the states under money transmission regulation and all of the individual state money trend. Regulators who regulate money transmitters in each state basically regulate all of the American crypto companies. And then you also have this New York state BitLicense, and then you also have the CFTC and the SEC. Getting involved in various places, just like the rest of the American regulatory regime is a patchwork. Everyone more or less, I don’t know anyone. I don’t know a single person who believes that the SEC and the CFTC should be two different institutions, right? Everyone thinks they should be merged. It’s just politically. The Senate Agriculture Commission Committee wants power and so they can’t be merged. In an ideal world, it would be regulated by some kind of merged CFTC FCC combo. Given that that’s not going to happen, you basically, I think, have to just pick one and it kind of doesn’t matter which you just need to pick one and go with it.

S3: And that’s that’s kind of the key, right? It’s folks want to know, like there’s no universe in which it’s going to be nobody and there’s no universe in which it’s going to be a brand new somebody. But the the absence of that definitive here’s who you look to is challenging.

S2: Good answers. Thank you, guys. By Slate Plus, say bye bye.

S1: Bye, bye, sapeurs. Thanks for Slate Blessing.