Which is moderate long-term interest rates.

And the reason I think that the, it isn't discussed much is simply that if the first two goals are pursued adequately, then the third will naturally be met.

He created a whole task force, as I said, to review it, and the implication clearly is reduce it.

If Warsh scales that back, then his Humphrey Hawkins testimony is going to become much more significant than the testimony of prior Fed chairs.

Part of the reason for that dominance is that the incumbent and the institution are also independent, and we've seen what happens when that breaks down.

So one of the most significant examples of a new Fed chair being chosen by the president and marking sort of a dramatic shift in Fed policy is President Nixon's choice of Arthur Burns.

As they say, with great power comes great responsibility, but also comes great political risks.

You know, you, you can't see the grimace on my face right now.

I'm very worried about how this is going to go.

Um, I, I, I think that if history teaches us anything, it's that having an independent Fed, a nonpartisan, independent Fed chair, is very important and very valuable economically, and I fear that we may lose that.

Hilt is a fan of the Baggio and Joshkel research, but he says that racial conflict may not be the only thing that could lead to lower productivity.

So a sailor might have an incentive to do his job well, not only because he wants to be successful and earn more money from the voyage, but also because he wants to be recognized as a good, you know, candidate to become an officer one day or get promoted to higher ranks.

So in a world of strict racial hierarchies, African American crew members, Portuguese crew members, Hawaiian crew members, they probably recognize that they were unlikely to be promoted and so that probably affected their incentives.

In other words, in a more diverse whaling crew, it may be that not all workers have equally strong incentives to work as hard as they can.

What you'd really like to know is what's life on board the vessel like when you have, you know, people from diverse places relative to a case where there's less diversity.

If you read, you know, journals of members of the crew who are describing what life is like, you do hear cases where, you know, there's anger and frustration at the fact that a lot of Portuguese is being spoken.

You know, what are these guys saying? Are they cooking up some kind of conspiracy? Similar in spirit to the comment you hear today about wanting everyone to speak English or something like that, right? So it's entirely plausible that productivity was lower in cases like that when there might have been a lot of tension among the different members of the crew.

This harpoon cannon was invented in the 1860s by a Norwegian whaling magnate named Sven Foyn.

So exactly at the time when the Americans were abandoning whaling in the late 19th century, the Norwegians were taking it up and establishing what we know today as the modern whaling industry.

They called it a Nantucket sleigh ride.

They could drag the whole whaling ship.

The other thing about these whales is that they tend to sink quickly.

The Americans would kill a sperm whale and sort of tow it back to the vessel.

You couldn't do that very easily with this gigantic blue whale.

So you not only need a cannon, but you need some kind of powerful device to actually bring the whale carcass up.

What share of illumination was provided by whale oil at the peak of whale oil illumination?

Oh, I'm sure it was very, very high.

There were different components to the market.

So, lighthouses, which need to be very bright, and street lights, which also need to be bright, they burned exclusively sperm whale oil.

Sperm whale oil could be refined into extremely high quality lubricants and illuminants.

The highest quality winter sperm oil, it does not congeal even at 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

It burns really well.

When there was a voyage that failed miserably, what exactly did that failure look like? Was the ship lost at sea? Did they just not find whales? Was there a mutiny and they hung the captain and killed each other?