Albert O. Hirschman

And one of the, I love your question about cost.

There was another study, there was actually an essay by an economist and a sociologist named Albert Hirschman.

And this was more than 50 years ago, he wrote a piece called a paper called Exit Voice and Loyalty.

And he basically looked at groups.

Two economies could have identical export concentration and very different capacities to respond when that relationship is disrupted.

Hirschman's work on asymmetric dependence points us towards the cost of replacing a relationship rather than simply its size.

So should Canada, therefore, worry less about the U.S.'s share of export itself and more about substitutability? In other words, I guess...

For our listeners, what I mean by that is how difficult we are for others to replace relative to how difficult they are for us to replace.

So I'm very sympathetic to this Hirschman perspective.

In fact, immediately after the election of President Trump for his second term, this was exactly one of the calculations I did.

I wanted to compare... how exposed a country was to their exports to the United States, and then compare that to how fast their exports were going to third markets.

And the ideal, the ultimate statistic I was interested in was, what's the number of years of growth to third markets, which if sustained at the current level, would enable a country to replace the United States' sales if they were all lost, or sales to the United States if they were all lost.

But courage can be contagious, too.

For the last few years, I have been single-mindedly obsessed with the question once articulated by economist A.O. Hirschman in his landmark 1970 book, Exit, Voice, Loyalty, and the cascading questions it prompts about power and courage.

Who in a dysfunctional and illiberal regime willingly sticks around? Who sticks around to try to mitigate harms? And who just races for the exits and loudly decries the harms being done? This all seemed very simple to me when I started to write about this decision structure in the first Trump administration.

It's been much murkier as the more principled Justice Department lawyers and military leaders depart and leave us all to the tender mercies of Emil Bove and Pete Hegseth.

Welcome to Amicus.

Well, it's so nice to see you.

And I am a fellow admirer of Albert Hirschman, which I would love to talk about with you.

But I just want to say thank you for Amicus and your writing.

Honestly, when I hear someone say that, I'm like.

You know, Albert Hirschman, you know, the famous economist, social scientist, analyzed the rhetoric, reactionary rhetoric, the rhetoric of conservative people.

It's always variations around those types of arguments.

This is futile or this is harmful.

Kind of seduced by Marxism, we explore different things.

I mean, Albert Hirschman and Simon Kuznets, all these development economists.

And then people like Prebysh Frutado, this Latin American structuralist.

We also studied dependency theory.

You have choices.

There's a book by Albert Hirschman called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.

When you have policies like you described at MIT, what Hirschman said is, is that, well, one thing you can do is you can scream and yell.

You can say, "Look, somebody, you need to change." But at some point, you realize you have only one choice left.

Exit voice and loyalty.

Hirschman's framework.

In a connected place, exit is cheap.

You don't like your neighborhood, you move.

And I think in the name first of scientism and then in the name of the more specific set of ideas around achieving compelling identification, we have erred on the side of looking for our wallet under the lamppost even after we've been looking under the lamppost for a long time and not seen the wallet and not being willing to think about the rest of the street.

So I think it's a good Princeton professor like yourself who brings Albert Hirschman to mind.

And I think if we had more of that and more welcoming of that, I think it would probably be a quite healthy thing.

Thanks a lot, Leardis.