And it's a movie too. But I also thought about how the self-care view probably wouldn't approve of her lifestyle for that for the week or two. She was working on this project, we're very quick to call procrastination self-care or something like that. And not to dis it at all, but I just was like, wow, she's really not even thinking about drinking her green smoothie right now. She's just so enthralled, and I just wonder how much we're missing out on the opportunity to really, I don't know, just be absorbed by our work in a good way and in a healthy way that still pushes the boundaries of what's possible for a human. I don't know. I was just fascinated and I want to cut enough of the distractions out to be able to at least have the capacity to do that with my work.

Yeah. Well, and I think it's the really important bit is that, I dunno, it's not that self-care isn't important, it's just that sometimes there are things that are more important than self-care and that our self-care in a different package. So doing something you care about that much and being able to be in a space where you can act like that, where that sort of thing just kind of emerges. I don't know. 

I remember; I get humans at their best.

Yeah, I really do. Over the summer, I think there was kind of this big move in, I guess lifestyle writers. They were like, bring back boredom. Boredom is really good for us. And that's where all the cool ideas come from. That's where all the weird synthesis, synthesis, the synthesis of all these ideas and things and characteristics and things you would never expect, that's where they all come from. And then you have to be aware that just because you're going to not be going to bed at the right time, so you can't wake up at who knows how early in the morning to do your 10 things on your to-do list before you actually start your real day. I've been watching a lot of productivity YouTube, if you can't tell a little bit of a guilty pleasure, but…

You're going down the rabbit hole. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know. There's just something about once you have that idea, once you have that drive, once you want to do something, understanding that it is good for you to actually follow through, even if it then breaks from your work rules. I feel like the self-care narrative has been so well, you need to segment your work life and your home life. There needs to be a balance, there needs to be whatever, but that doesn't really make sense because especially as more people in the economy and in the world, focus on tasks that require their brains means you can't just turn your brain off and neither do we want it to. How you actually get all the good, I guess, understanding of your values and application of stuff that we say you should be thinking about and studying and all of that. So I don't know

This new world where the typical work boundaries, I mean, I'm home visiting my family and I kind of like it that way. I'm able to do both and enjoy flipping back and forth and making it all. And maybe that's part of it is that for people who love their work and are really focused on something, they're just able to make it kind of who they are and not have to always compartmentalize. So not for everyone, but maybe for intellectuals, that's something that we can just embrace.

I also am just totally going to copy your tradition. I think it's fantastic, and I need a little bit of that in my life. 

It’s a great Christmas movie. I think there's two or three Christmas mornings throughout the movie, and so it's just enough to be like, yes, this is totally a Christmas movie.

I mean, if Die Hard is a Christmas movie, then right. 

Alright, just throw Harry Potter in there too for me.

Yeah. Oh, perfect. So let's talk about this mesocosmos thing, which to me sounds kind of like a biology term. I don't know why.

Totally get that. 

Yeah, I don't know how to explain it, but I want to start off by reading the Hayek quote that you sent me to get us started.

Yeah.

That's good. He said, if we were to apply the unmodified uncurbed rules of the microcosmos-i.e., of the small band or troop or of say our families to the macrocosmos or wider civilization, as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of worlds at once. So before we even get into the mesocosmos, which he doesn't mention, what are the micro and macro cosmos?

Yeah.

I've been having trouble pluralizing things recently.

So this is a quote from The Fatal Conceit, which I wrote towards the end of his career, and he's responding to socialism in this book. I mean, he is responding to the fatal conceit that we think we're smart enough to plan other people's lives and that there's sort of an intellectual advantage that some people have over others to be able to know what's best for them. And so he sees that the appeal of socialism is really strong, and he says here instinctual, he obviously, he incorporates evolutionary kind of insights or evolutionary psychology into his work. And this is a really interesting critique of socialism that there's actually something in us that wants to treat everybody like our brother or sister. And we in the band or in the band or troop, like he mentioned, we're able to apply the rules of the microcosmos, which he kind of is saying is just this arena where things are intimate, they're other focused, you can share, there's benevolence, there's solidarity in that, and you these people and you're able to, it's like Adam Smith when he has these fears of who you're able to care for and show benevolence toward.

And he certainly starts with family and this band or troop kind of idea. So then the macro cosmos is the extended order, and it's hard to really say what that is, but always when I have presented this idea, I've done a picture of a mom and a son kind.

They clearly know each other. They clearly have a personal relationship, and then just a picture of a city street or an airport or something where it's just set up, there's a different set of rules that govern that social space compared to a one-on-one relationship. And so the rules of the extended order he's saying can't really be applied to the band or troop or families because they just treat people basically transactionally. I mean, of course there's still some sociality that's there, but if you treated, you can't take care of everyone. You take care of your children. And so he is like, well, we can't take care of our children transactionally, but also we can't treat everyone we would our family. And so there's this distinction and so socialism that some of the ethos of it in some of the underlying, like you said, instincts of it, is that we should be able to apply the rules of the microcosmos to everyone to be benevolent towards everyone, to have those ideals of equality and solidarity that we're so attractive to the political supporters. And so yeah, that's the context of the quote. And then clearly there's something in the middle there that we're trying to fill with meso, even though he doesn't mention it.

So I don't know. What was striking to me about how you were talking through this is that there's kind of a subtle acknowledgement that something the socialists get right or something that they kind of understand that I want to say classical liberals, I don't want to say that we don't, but that we do not bring to the forefront and something that we kind of act against. So it's kind of implicit is this desire to care for everyone and treat everyone like a brother. I mean, maybe it's just that practically we know that that's not possible. I'm thinking about Christmas. If everyone on earth was in your living room on Christmas morning, it would ruin it. It wouldn't be Christmas because it's supposed to be a time spent with family. And while you hope that everyone has that for themselves, there's still this, there's a certain number of people more or less that make it what it is. If you're alone, not good. If everyone's in your living room not good. And I feel like we've almost been, I don't know, I guess we're about to talk about it, so we'll see. I think it's important that we make explicit the importance of that impulse, because I do think that it is kind of for survival just on the evolutionary side of things, but also we're pretty empathetic beings. I mean, [Adam] Smith and Hayek seem to understand that. And so I don't know. I feel like it's almost definitely, it's almost easy to be like, oh, socialists silly, silly. But there's something about the fact that you want to care about people, even people you don't know or will never see in your life that at least I have been not great at acknowledging because it's so much easier to just sweep it under the rug, right?

Sure. Yeah, no, he really does bring out, acknowledge these sentimental yearnings and give them some weight. And I think one thing about the mesocosmos approach is it's basically we're just identifying all of the associations that are kind of in between those two sets of rules or sets of organizations and using a combined set of rules that incorporates both. And so family is certainly one place where this happens because now we aren't banned, man. We are in sort of this modern, Steven Horwitz has a lot of great work on, he calls his book Hayek's Modern Family because it's something totally different than it ever has been before. It is kind of a voluntary association in a sense. And so there's things that modern families have to do to really interact with the wider civilization every single day on behalf of their members. And so that's why we've moved the family theoretically kind of into this middle space is because it's something that mediates between the individual and the extended.

Anyway, the other point I wanted to make on that is that there's kind of a way to fulfill those sentimental yearning through associations, though family, church, nonprofits, all kinds of voluntary aid associations and things like this. And altruism is certainly something you can engage in. But what socialism and even more left political still try to do is kind of play on those sentimental yearnings and say, okay, we can outsource that to government and you can fulfill those sentimental yearnings and those instincts through basically your tax dollars or basically surrendering all of your private property and letting us handle that. And that's been something I've been seeing more lately as I see people trying to fulfill those yearning or those moral obligations honestly, through either like a government pathway or a political pathway or more in their private lives where they have a little bit more involvement in fulfilling those obligations and instincts. That's a really interesting contrast that he sees here.

So I guess, let me know if this kind of comparison is right, and this is going to be maybe a little too involved with pure principles of economics to maybe make any sense. But this is how I'm thinking about it because this is the most recent, I guess thing I've been thinking about that connects when we initially teach about market structures. You kind of start with this very basic concept of, okay, there's perfect competition and then there's monopoly, and then there's this thing that we call monopolistic competition, which basically is just like a giant bucket that means everything in between, even though a perfectly competitive market with one fewer firm is not really anything like an oligopolistic market or a duopoly or something. But it's an easy way to teach the very explicit, very graphable, solvable, pure examples and then say, okay, well, you can take components of each and mix and match, and then you have everything in between. And that's kind of what monopolistic competition is, and that's kind of how I'm thinking of the mesocosmos, that it's everything kind of in between you and all, is that right?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And whenever we, my coauthor [Mikayla] Novak [at] Mercatus, and we've talked to people about this, and that's one of the questions is, so is that means just kind of everything then. And it's like, well, I mean it does encapsulate a lot because we are social human actors, and so this definitely comes out of a lot that [Richard] Wagner did on human associations and sort of the social view of the economic man. And you're right, yeah, it is a lot. There's a between me and everyone in the whole world in the whole market. And so I think you're getting that right for sure. We're just trying to break down some of the grasp bubble features of it, some of the especially productive, especially unique, especially helpful things that happen in that space that are often overlooked, I guess. 

Well, and that's honestly a great sell, not that you're trying to sell it really, but I was going to ask you why it's important to do this if it might maybe encapsulate everything and let me know if this is right. It almost reminds me of [Soren] Kierkegaard where you're like, okay, well Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, he talks about the individual and the whole and how to reach salvation. And you can kind of tell, he's talking about Hegel who does not agree with him, and he's an individualist Kierkegaard, and you're like, why is he breaking this down and why does he keep repeating himself? And he repeats himself, but he changes one or two words or changes the sentence structure and it's very poetic, but you're like, what is this guy talking about? Except by the end of it, you kind of realize that what he's done is he's basically laid out something that you'd be like, okay, you just segmented society in X way.

You could also have segmented in a different way and look at it differently. But what he kind of accomplishes by doing that is he takes you through how the individual relates to God and relates to society and how you actually as an individual engage with society and affects society. And the method that you do that is really important, right? Because he thinks that by relating connecting to God, the individual can see the best way to engage and what their role is and all of that. And without that, you're lost. Without that you're trying to swim upstream without looking at where the water is flowing. And so that's kind of what you're reminding me of where the reason why it's important to look at these substructures to look at these specific segments is to understand how actually the two ends of the extreme relate to each other. Because we do think it's different from the way socialists think about things, but why and how and what is significant about that and how do we communicate that?

Yeah, exactly. And so he leaves us with this sort of charge that, so we must learn to live in two sorts of worlds that once. And the question then is how exactly, like you said, how do we act as individuals who clearly our actions have these macro level consequences once we interact with each other? That's the whole spontaneous order. Our actions are creating something kind of beyond our grasp. But also Hayek wasn't just because he's big on spontaneous order, it doesn't mean he doesn't talk about organizations and sort of the other side of the coin where people actually put their heads together to do something about a problem or they willingly link themselves up with other people to accomplish something or to enjoy their company. And so he talks about suborders a lot.

He talks about obviously organizations as the contrast with spontaneous orders, and he starts to talk about more particular societies, which is kind of his phrase, and he is like, there's something, there's the great society and then there's particular societies within the great society, and those overlap and they're kind of hard to quantify, and you can be a member of multiple suborders or partial societies, but he doesn't fully take the time to go through it in detail. So he talks about spheres of activities also, and so then we're just kind of saying, okay, well, he left the door open to do a little bit more. And of course people have done this, I mentioned Wagner and others. We kind of venture into the realm of studying self-governance here and studying the ways in which people get together to solve problems. So that's why I think it's important because there really are alternatives to things that the government, for example, has taken on. And there are also things that we sometimes want to relegate to markets that maybe do have a little bit of a need for actual some market aspects, but also then something else that we need to mix them together to be able to accomplish that goal in the best way. That's where you see we're definitely, Hayek actually mentions Richard Cornuelle, who is the one who really talks about the third sector and civil society in America.

And it is just interesting to think about how you can combine rules of the micro, so benevolence, like I said, personal relationships and then combine that with maybe a profit motive or something like that, and have these really interesting cases where those two sets of rules are productive in a unique combination. So I, there's several examples we could talk about how families do that and how different organizations do that, but bringing attention to what's happening in the middle can really, I think just give us hope. I think it can also help to fight for some of those spaces that might be being infringed upon.

This is the missing middle. I know that's not the right context, but yes.

It's no, it's the missing middle. Exactly. Exactly. And not to say that no one else has tried to bring attention to it, but I think it's so much of our lives and so much of the productive and life giving aspects of life that our macro could not obsess without.

It's funny because it's almost like, I think we rely on the grey area a lot like the ambiguous InBetween, but honestly characterizing it I think is going to do us as a society a lot of good. So the focus on third spaces is maybe an example, even though I think it's a little silly, but also I see it, it's a real thing. I think we are always like, oh, no government, but whatever. Figure it out. People will choose what they want. But how I think now we focus so much on turning everything into a binary just as a society, it's individual or it's all, it's this or it's that, whatever. Then of course there's some sort of missing middle, missing third space, missing, whatever, that actually looking at what is in the middle, what is in between the zero and the one is really important. So I really appreciate this effort. On the note about rules before we get into families and as we get into it, are all the types of associations within this middle ground, the meso cosmos, do they follow similar rules or are they kind of different? You talked about how different characteristics can kind of play into the middle ground, but how do you go about characterizing it just from a greater overall standpoint to start with?

Yeah, no, that's a great question. So there are some themes I think that can really summarize what these middle institutions are doing. And so I don't know if you can call them rules, but combining the intimate and extended or the micro and the macro you end up. So let's just think about the family. I'll just go ahead and jump into that because I don't have kids yet, but I can imagine that there would be things that I would want to protect my kids from in the marketplace. So we want people to be able to do what they want in the market or in the extended order generally as classical liberals, but that doesn't mean that we want all of that stuff coming into our own houses or homes and therefore our minds and sort of our own little societies. And so one thing that these middle institutions can do is kind of mediate or protect.

So there's kind of one path to where you can have regulation on something or you can have parents providing that filter of like, oh no, you're not going to watch this, but you can watch this. Or you're not going to listen to that, but you can listen to this or you're not going to have this social media actually right now is prime example. There are huge pushes to even, especially from the conservative side of things to say, okay, well the government needs to lock down on what kids can do on social media, the accounts they can create.

And that's clearly something that parents have the power to do, but kind of don't, which is interesting. And so then they're like, well, yeah, someone should do something about this. But at a theoretical level, families for those who don't have the privilege of having a family, other organizations, religious communities, orphanages, nonprofits are trying to mimic what maybe a family would do in that situation as far as protecting, mediating. And then when you think about trying to combine the rules, there's also something strictly economically productive about combining them. So training a child, for example, this is kind of going the other way to training them from this micro like, okay, it's all about me, or it's just about our little household to then go out and be prepared and train to engage in exchange to say, okay, we're going to kids already naturally train and stuff with their siblings, or might want to have some kind of a store or something like that. But to encourage that and then to teach kids how to engage in commerce outside the home or to have some of these moral values that help them productively successfully engage in exchange outside the home.

Family businesses are a really interesting case where you family businesses actually have an advantage where they combine some of those personal rules. They mingle the intimate relations with their business objectives and remittances people, this is kind of going back the other direction again. They go and work in the marketplace and send money home to be able to provide in those benevolent relationships. So I don't quite know how to generalize because it's really so beautiful though the different ways that these are intermingled. But I think a few ways to of break it down would just be like whenever there's a situation where you're like, we need something mediating here, we need protection, we need training. And it is easy to visualize from a child going in and being prepared to engage in the extended order. You can see that there's a lot that has to happen in between.

But I guess it's kind of like why we don't have spot markets for everything too, why firms occur and why nonprofit associations decide to exist. They're combining rules that we would use on the market strictly maybe in a spot market kind of trading situation and saying, well, we need to add a little more human, we need each other in this process if we're going to actually address this problem or sell this product or raise this child and we need to do it together. And it ends up being something totally unique from if you were doing it alone, because you have to be able to relate to each other productively and take advantage of the sociality that we have in us. So that's not a very good answer, but I think it reflects the fact that it's not super generalizable besides kind of some general, these organizations are mediating between individuals and society and they're protecting someone vulnerable often. And they're also training, often training us to engage in one extreme or the other. And that's my best conception of it right now as I'm still thinking through

It. Yeah. Well, it's funny because especially on the economic side of things, there's a lot of empirical work on the importance of having two parents in the household or having strong communal structures. But as economists typically do, I think they don't really ask why. I mean, two is better than one pretty obviously, but there's kind of this missing piece, which I think you're getting at here, which is the social bit. It just fits with human beings. And it's funny because economic studies, human beings in our decisions. And yet when you look at the work that's been done, no one really cares why, but why. And the method of getting there, the reason why two parents is better than one other than just strictly by resources is really important.

And we're trying to understand what institutional setups help promote cooperation broadly. So yeah, we're studying human action and then we're studying the ways in which they organize themselves to best cooperate and to lead to flourishing. And so I totally agree with the observation that we're getting a lot better at putting our foot down on what are some of those best institutional arrangements for society. Flourishing. I mean, obviously property rights and like you said to parents, to married parents, that's something that is kind of an empirical fact now. But to go back, I mean, we do have to kind of have a motivating why, and it is because you can't just throw, we are Wagner talks about how we have to recognize that we are not fond of living in isolation. We want to live with other people. And so we're trying to figure out how to best do that while Hayek says, not overdoing it and not allowing there to be progress.

Yeah, I mean it is like no man is an island, but no man is an island populated by 8 billion people at the same time, if that makes any sense. So okay. I think something that's been interesting to me is that is hard to characterize because it seems that it's a super dynamic thing where there are a lot of variables in not only any given association, so the family or a firm or whatever. The way that each individual, one of those units operates is very specific to the conditions that they are in. And then they're all different from each other. So how do you go about studying such a thing and learning about what's important when obviously we can look at greater trends and cluster and group and whatever, but how do you figure out what the important characteristics are and the mechanisms if we're working with such diverse associations even within the family or something like that?

Yeah, definitely. I love to use case studies. I love to think of economics as ethnography of incorporating mixed methods to really hear from people and hear how they have best learned to associate productively and cooperate so far. I mean, this is likely going to be a short book or monograph, but really just diving into cases of how this works. I mean, I mentioned remittances, but there are 639 trillion that have circulated the world in remittances. And that was as of a couple years ago. And Viviana Zelizer has really interesting work that she's done on economic circuits where it's like, yeah, this is economic activity for sure, but it's very social. It's very, people have come up with these rules to be able to include and exclude people from their economic circuit or their little economy that they've come up with.

And it's fascinating because like you said, it's multifaceted, but I think collecting some of the most compelling cases where we can see this one, I mean, remittances have really represented international aid, so clearly it's a macro variable that is really significant, but the channels through which it's occurring are relational family businesses I mentioned. And then when it comes to Richard Cornuelle and civil society, he really did just tell stories. And he brought cases I remember still, I don't remember which of his books it's in, but it is a story of a man met people who met prisoners who'd been released and are coming back in, transitioning back into side. And he would meet them at the gates with money for a bus fare and meal and whatever else they needed to get home and to get somewhere, because a lot of times they would just be released with nowhere to go.

And there's just, you sometimes just have to tell the stories, I think of people who are solving society problems and problems that we think are impossible to address. I know in the North Carolina hurricanes this past fall, I was reading just a tweet thread on how the churches in that area are actually doing, they're really putting their money where their mouth is as far as how the rebuilding efforts, and this happened in New Orleans too. So I do think it's one of those questions where you have to rely on qualitative methods. And of course something like the 639 trillion remittances is a quantitative fact. So I'm kind of pulling those and just trying to listen too as people and notice the ways that people associate to solve problems. And yeah, it's just going to be a kind of a long-term collection of those stories. And some people aren't going to be satisfied with that, and that's okay. But I think it's a worthwhile, we think Mikayla, and I think it's worthwhile to just kind of say we're never going to be able to cover everything that's happening in this missing middle. But to use to say that as Wagner and Hayek and others have said that people are bringing their economizing action to their social relationships and just observe that and just tell those stories is something that we need more of. So I hope to continue just being able to observe and collect data in a mixed methods kind of way.

Well, yeah, because now I'm wondering how do remittances compare with actual foreign aid from governments in their effectiveness? You would think, obviously there are people that receive foreign aid from government. I don't actually even really know what that works, so I'm talking out of my butt here. But there are people who are receiving it from government that maybe don't have family sending it back. But also, how is the administration of that money, the rules that you're relying on, the setup you have with the people you're sending it to, how does that affect the way the money gets spent and how much it helps? That's a really important question to answer, and you have to know the method. You have to know the channel in order to be able to, that wasn't English, to be able to even study it. So that's super fascinating. 

Thank you so much. Yeah, and theoretically that the knowledge problem is implicitly being addressed there, which is cool. So just kind of collecting stories, collecting data on where it works.

Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast and for sharing this really awesome project with us. I learned a ton and I know that my listeners have as well. I have one last question for you, but we are not done because there are more of these to come as you keep collecting. So listeners look forward, what is one thing that you believed at one time in your life that you later changed your position on and why?

Well, I am learning a lot these days just being kind of mid twenties and hoping to begin teaching, been taking classes, lots of learning. But one thing I'll say is I think I'm learning is that I can't really accomplish things on my own. And this is definitely keeping with theme, but that our set of opportunities and just when we want to achieve any kind of goals or dreams, it really is going to be about who's there to do it with you and who's there to help you pursue those and also to create ones together. So the flip side of that is I really thought I could do it on my own. So I guess I believed that, alright, life was going to go a certain way and I will check these boxes. But one great thing about living in a dynamic economy is that things change.

And I think I might've also believed that that was a negative thing, but I've been preaching to my students that the gains from trade and from creative destruction totally outweigh the negatives. Even though to be a recipient of the concentrated costs of that really states. But I would've thought that was a negative thing, especially it affected me. And now even as I'm watching higher education change, I'm watching just our economy change really rapidly. It can be scary sometimes to think, how am I going to fit into this? But I think I'm trying to believe instead of my earlier fear that the changes that are coming in our economy and just the technological shifts that are happening that are wild, that there's always an opportunity and we just have to figure out what that is and what our comparative advantage is in that new economy. And so specifically with higher ed, I feel like there's lots of gears these days. There are some schools shrinking, closing higher eds. It's in flux kind of, I would say, but trying to really believe what I've been teaching, that the things that are coming are going to be even better and even more full of opportunities. I dunno if we just keep looking for ways to adapt to the new circumstance. So I guess I would've believed in short that that is a really bad thing or scary thing to be affected by technological shifts and shocks, but trying to believe that it's going to be full of awesome, unexpected opportunities.

Once again, I'd like to thank my guest for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to The Great Antidote Podcast means a lot. The Great Antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at Great antidote@libertyfund.org. Thank you.