Is the US an emerging market?

Katie Martin (0:06)

Pushkin. Hello, and welcome to a special edition of the Unhedged podcast, a live recording in a drinking establishment in Ireland. What can possibly go wrong? I have in front of me an audience of real humans. Real humans, say hello. So as usual, I am Katie Martin from the Financial Times in London, but everything else is different. I'm sitting in the Home Rule Club in Kilkenny at the Kilkenomics Festival, which is a mix of comedy and economics, which sounds terrible. Sounds like the worst idea on earth, but it works. It's great fun. You don't need to be a huge economics nerd to enjoy it. Now, the festival is great fun, in part because it has great speakers, and I've nabbed two of the best of them for the Unhedged podcast today. They are, big welcome, please, for that guy, David McWilliams.

David McWilliams (1:01)

Thank you.

Katie Martin (1:03)

Everyone knows McWilliams. McWilliams knows everyone, but he's that guy. He's an author, an economics pointy head. He's the patron saint of the Kilkenomics Festival. David, say hello so the listeners know your voice.

David McWilliams (1:15)

It is delightful to be doing this from here, from the Home Rule Club.

Katie Martin (1:20)

Yeah, yeah.

David McWilliams (1:20)

He should be the first of many.

Katie Martin (1:22)

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I'm also joined by that other guy, Mark Blyth. So, David and I are pretending we know what we're doing. Mark actually knows what he's doing. He's the real deal. He's a professor at Brown University in the States. He's a political economist. I was just doing another session at Kilkenomics with Mark a minute ago, and you were swearing a lot. And this podcast is a family show, Mark, so just, you know, try.

Mark Blyth (1:51)

Try and keep it in. It's a Scottish thing. We lack adjectives.

Katie Martin (1:55)

Now that you've had your kebab, you should be all right. Yeah. Just to set the scene a little bit, David, what is Kilkenomics and why does this terrible idea actually work really well?

David McWilliams (2:06)

Okay. So Kilkenomics came, it's now in its 15th year, which is kind of bonkers because I still think, oh, we started this a couple of years ago. The idea came from when this country had one of its many crashes. Yeah. I was asked to do something very odd, which is to do a one man show in the Abbey Theatre, our national theatre. So the head of the Abbey said, look, everybody can't figure out why on Monday we were the richest people in the world, and by Wednesday afternoon, we were bankrupt. I'll explain that to everybody because it happened very quickly. We thought we were flying, right? We thought we were buying property all over the place and everything was grand. So in the audience were a couple of friends of mine, I've known for a long time, one of whom was Richard Cook, who was the man behind the Kilkenny Cat Laughs comedy festival. Richard said to me, look, there's something about this idea of getting up on stage and doing economics. So that was it. It was the idea was, was like most ideas was seen through the bottom of various glasses. And we kicked off, it was very, very hard initially to persuade anyone to come of the, of the speakers. But what was interesting is even from the very first year, the audiences were very strong. Yeah. So it meant that people were actually in the mood to understand. I mean, I've always felt that economics is far too important. To be left to economists. I actually feel that economists don't understand the economy in many ways. I remember when I was a kid, all of us were obsessed with, and this is girls and boys playing something called football cards. Right? So you'd get these football cards. These were so, so I'd swap you two Kenny Daglish's for a Martin book and showing my age, all that sort of stuff.

And the kids were so good, all of us naturally took to supply, demand, scarcity, price, value, all these essential ideas. We took to this a second nature. The cleracy, and this is really important, have mangled the message to such an extraordinary degree, that they have elevated possibly the most inarticulate, unrepresentative people to explain this to the average person who, when they were eight years old, understood it. So this is part of a career-long campaign to bring back the football cards. That's what it's in effect.

Katie Martin (4:42)

But even when you're talking about the UK budget, it's all about really abstract concepts like fiscal headroom. What the hell is fiscal headroom? You're not talking about real things. So let's talk about a real thing. The essay question I would like to pose to you both today is, is the USA a big, fat emerging market?