Lately, we’re all struggling with rising prices. Back in 2021, millennial economist Isabella Weber said it didn’t have to be this way, and she’s finally being vindicated.
Was all this inflation really necessary? Our guest, economist Isabella Weber says no. In fact, she’s been saying no since the Omicron variant was a thing. In 2021, at age 33, Weber wrote an article for The Guardian that tied inflation to corporate greed – calling out “an explosion of profits” as a central force in driving up prices. She was vilified online, and the establishment turned her into “the most hated woman in economics.”
But history has proved Isabella Weber right, and the world’s caught up to her thinking. Weber travelled to Toronto recently to receive the Broadbent Institute’s 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize. She joined us at The Globe to talk about the tumultuous ride of the past four years, the historical impact of price controls, and the bittersweet taste of vindication.
Also, Vass and Katrina lament the rising cost of deodorant.
This is Lately. Every week, we take a deep dive into the big, defining trends in business and tech that are reshaping our every day.
Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Andrea Varsany. Our sound designer is Cameron McIver.
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Find the transcript of today’s episode here.
We’d love to hear from you. Send your comments, questions or ideas to lately@globeandmail.com.
Vass Bednar [00:00:00] I'm Vass Bednar and I'm the host of Lately.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:02] And I'm Katrina Onstad. I'm the executive producer of Lately. Today's guest is someone that you Vass wanted on the show before our show even existed.
Vass Bednar [00:00:12] Yeah.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:12] She's a German economist named Doctor Isabella Weber. And in your world of policy nerds, if I may, she's both famous and infamous. The New Yorker referred to her as the most hated woman in economics.
Vass Bednar [00:00:25] I think that economics textbooks are going to be rewritten because of her work, if they aren't already.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:31] Wow.
Vass Bednar [00:00:32] And she basically is asking this question, which is; did the last four years have to be as painful as they've been for our bank accounts? She says, no, it didn't have to be this way. And by saying that out loud and in the open, she suffered a social media pile on that, was pretty brutal. But she was undeterred. She rose from those Twitter ashes, did not delete her account, and doubled down on her research. And I have to say, I think that's kind of hot. It's it's Netflix material.
Katrina Onstad [00:01:01] Yes. It's definitely redemption arc going on here. Okay, so a few years ago, in an article in The Guardian, Isabella Weber considered whether companies were hiding behind inflation to hike their prices. And now research has shown that corporate profits ballooned during the pandemic. And we saw this in Canada, of course, where aggregate corporate profits surged to the highest share of GDP in history, according to the center for Future Work.
Vass Bednar [00:01:26] Yeah, and these profits were happening in some of our biggest industries, like gas, real estate, construction, supermarkets.
Katrina Onstad [00:01:32] Okay, I need a concrete example of this. Like, how did I feel this in my life?
Vass Bednar [00:01:38] Okay. What's something that you purchased recently?
Katrina Onstad [00:01:43] Deodorant.
Vass Bednar [00:01:44] Deodorant, love.
Katrina Onstad [00:01:46] I'm not too shy to say.
Vass Bednar [00:01:49] Most of us use it. The thing with something like deodorant is that super early in the pandemic, we were primed that that product might be more expensive because of a range of other factors, the cost of shipping, demand exceeding supply, lots of economics, kind of 101 stuff. The orthodox response is that central bankers attempt to control inflation by nudging or, in Canada's case, jacking up interest rates. And what that does is it curbs our spending because it makes everything more expensive. It's painful for people, right? It's the equivalent of a drop in your salary. You have less purchasing power. But we're sort of told, okay, suck it up. This is what we all have to do together to get through this difficult time.
Katrina Onstad [00:02:31] So this is why my deodorant went from like 4 to $11. I don't know if that's exactly right, but that's what it felt like.
Vass Bednar [00:02:38] That's why your deodorant became $11. But the reason your deodorant stayed $11 is what Isabella's pointing to. So her research suggests that companies use inflation as a shield or cloak to price gouge. Her idea is that during massive economic jolts, nerds call them shocks (not like the basketball shoes) but these shocks like a pandemic, there should be strategic, targeted time, limited price controls. This allows corporations to still remain profitable, but just not record high profitable.
Katrina Onstad [00:03:13] Which really set some people off because this is a kind of intervention that's at odds with trust in an unfettered free market. And it did. It triggered a lot of economists. So when Weber put this out there, the idea was dismissed as wildly radical. She wrote about this in The Guardian in 2021. That article was published while she was skiing. She came off the slopes and she discovered that she had just been crucified online. It was very ugly. And I wondered, do you remember that moment Vass? I know you are a deep follower of Econ Twitter.
Vass Bednar [00:03:45] Oh yeah, I totally remember that moment. I mean, I didn't know about her and her research. I just noticed this pile on, very dismissive, very cruel, and that sort of got me curious about what it was this person was saying. And I went to read her piece, and I actually thought it was pretty well substantiated and that the reaction seemed unwarranted. Now, what's really interesting to me is that governments around the world have come around to this. And her thinking has had these real world effects, right, tangible. Influencing policy decisions in the EU. And even the Biden administration has regulated the price of oil.
Katrina Onstad [00:04:20] And yet in Canada, we haven't really seen any concrete adoption of her theories. This week, after four long years, the Bank of Canada did just announce a modest interest rate cut, which will bring some relief. But so far, it's actually only the NDP that have been putting forward Weber-esque ideas, including proposing an excess profits tax in the grocery sector, which definitely feels aligned with Weber's point of view.
Vass Bednar [00:04:45] In that family. Right? Trying to curb corporate overreach.
Katrina Onstad [00:04:48] Yeah, she's having a bit of a I told you so a moment, which we're here for.
Vass Bednar [00:04:52] Oh my God, savor it. Really. On a personal note, what got me interested is that she's a millennial economist, changing how we think. She's challenging the limitations of central bankers, who tend to be much older men, and the debate is very kind of old school, new school. It does skew older versus younger. She was only 33 when that article in The Guardian came out. And sometimes the debates even a bit gendered.
Katrina Onstad [00:05:17] Yeah. So Doctor Isabella Weber is our guest. She's an associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She's the author of How China Escaped Shock Therapy The Market Reform Debate.
Vass Bednar [00:05:29] And she was in Toronto as the recipient of the Broadbent Institute's Ellen Meiksins Wood's Lecture. She joined us at the Globe and Mail's podcast studio. This is Lately. You set econ-Twitter or just general Twitter on fire with an op ed in the Guardian way back in December 2021. Why did you write the piece in the first place?
Isabella Weber [00:06:05] That's a great question. So, first of all, I did not see that coming at all. The piece came out between Christmas and New Year's, which is known as the black hole of media. And as inflation took off in 2021, I felt that the closest historical analogy that we had was actually the one with the transition from war to post war, because in both cases, you had a situation where the state temporarily took very far reaching decisions that impacted what people could produce, how they could consume, and so on. Of course, in wartime, even more dramatic than during Covid. But what we have seen during Covid time was as dramatic as something that we hadn't seen in our lifetimes. Right? Now, from my historical research, I knew that basically hardly anyone had studied this in a very long time. And I also knew that in the 1940s, the most important economist at the time, people like Frank Knight, was the mentor of Milton Friedman, like Paul Samuelson, the most important mainstream textbook author of the 20th century, agreed with someone like Paul Sweezy, the most important American Marxist economist at the time, that in this kind of situation where you had bottlenecks, you had temporary supply constraints, and you had relatively strong demand, you would get prices shooting up in ways that would trigger inflation, create windfall profits, but ultimately erase the purchasing power of ordinary people and hence result in big political and economic harm. So they were arguing at the time that the recipe to respond to this would be temporary, targeted price controls that prevent this situation from occurring. The price cap could be a beneficial policy. So what I wanted to do with this op ed really was to say, this is what the most important economists of the 20th century were arguing when they were looking at a situation that was structurally similar to what we were facing, and that this also meant that we did not have to respond with interest rate hikes. We did not have to respond by pushing down the whole economy, because we had bottlenecks in some specific sectors where we could try to address them with a more surgical, more targeted kind of policy toolbox.
Vass Bednar [00:08:24] So it's late December. You put this idea forward, here's some history, here's some observations. What was it like to start to receive the responses and the chatter associated with the piece?
Isabella Weber [00:08:37] Oh, it was absolutely awful. I'm not fortunate enough to have learned to ski when I was a child. And I was trying to learn to ski in the Adirondacks. This was when Omicron was on the rise. And you can hear from my accent that I'm not originally from the US, so I did not travel back home to Germany because we were like, we are not going to bring Omicron home to the Christmas tree
Vass Bednar [00:08:57] Yeah.
Isabella Weber [00:08:58] back to our families. So instead we went to the Adirondacks and I was there with my partner. And I mean, the internet exploded, and I had no idea how it feels to become the target of that kind of storm. And it was really when a certain Nobel Memorial laureate used, rather stark language that the floodgates of hate were completely open up. Basically, any kind of civility, any kind of politeness was completely gone. To be sure, he has apologized, in contrast to many other people who said very ugly things at the time. But it was absolutely shocking. I think no one should experience anything like it. I think we need a serious conversation about the culture in economics. And I think that in the unprecedented times that we are living through, I mean, I would argue that we are still in a situation of overlapping emergencies. Climate change is a reality. Epidemiologists are arguing that the next pandemic might be coming sooner than we think. The global order is as unstable as it hasn't been in many decades. So we are in unchartered waters. In that kind of situation, you need an openness in economics, where someone who is trying to say something seriously based on historical research is not going to be called truly stupid, attacked, ridiculed, become the subject of misogynist interventions and so on.
Vass Bednar [00:10:17] And you just said that phrase, but it's economist Paul Krugman who tweeted those two words, "truly stupid" and then did later apologize and deleted his tweet. But I think a lot of people noticed that kind of behavior and activity. There seem to be a lot of, I think you could frame that as, passion or anger in people's online responses. You mentioned misogyny. What was happening? Do you think there's ageism there? Like, why did people think it was appropriate to discuss an idea that way?
Isabella Weber [00:10:45] Yeah, I mean, the irony in regards to Paul Krugman's Twitter thread is that he started with this tweet, which he deleted later on. But thousands of people have seen it. So I think I can repeat.
Vass Bednar [00:10:56] Oh, we've got the Wayback machine. Don't worry.
Isabella Weber [00:10:58] "I'm not a free market seller but this is totally stupid." And the tweets in the thread below this were actually much more nuanced. And we're basically starting by saying price controls can be useful in very specific situations of emergencies. But this is not the situation we are in. Right? So at the end of the day, this means that this extreme reaction was coming forward, even though there was an agreement that price controls could be useful in certain situations. So the thing that we ultimately disagreed on was whether in December 2021, we were still living in a situation of emergency or not, where I happened to think we were in a situation of emergency, looking at what was happening with the gas prices, looking at the warnings around Ukraine, looking at the global geopolitical situation, looking at how many people were still dying from Covid, how supply chains were still effected, how there were still huge backlogs and so on. I happen to be of the opinion that we were still in an emergency, but that should be a question that one can debate. That is not the question that gets people heated up, right. The question that gets people heated up is whether the free private market price is the universal unique coordinator of the economy or not.
Vass Bednar [00:12:15] Yeah.
Isabella Weber [00:12:15] And the moment that you say states could actually do something about prices, you kind of open up the Pandora's box of saying not everything at all times, even in situations of extreme emergency, should always exclusively be regulated only by market forces in the price setting of private agents.
Vass Bednar [00:12:36] So let's go to your ideas and your work and your research. What is sellers inflation?
Isabella Weber [00:12:44] So sellers inflation is basically saying that inflation can be driven by both wages or profit. So that's a starting point. To be more specific what we are arguing is that there have been major price and profit explosions in systemically important areas, like for example, gas and oil, the shipping industry, the food commodity sector, take the example of grain. In all these instances, you have had massive price explosions, and with these price explosions, you had profit explosions. Now, as these prices explode, this means that the costs for a very large number of firms explode, because these are all important inputs to a whole range of firms across the economy. What has happened is that firms were like, okay, my costs are exploding, but I know that the costs of my competitors are also exploding. So I'm going to respond to this by increasing prices in ways that protect my profit margins. If firms under other circumstances start raising their prices, even under situations of high degrees of concentration, they would risk losing market share to their competitors. So it is this moment of coordination. This clear signal. Now is the time, like now and never, that made it possible for these kind of price hikes to occur.
Vass Bednar [00:14:05] And you picked up other signals of that happening. So you and a fellow researcher analyzed transcripts of company earnings calls, and you concluded that firms in a variety of industries knew this, exactly what you're talking about, that they could get away with gouging consumers who were already primed by the chaos of the pandemic to anticipate these price hikes. What was it like to see that evidence?
Isabella Weber [00:14:29] Yeah, I mean, reading these earnings calls it's like...They are saying it, right? I mean, so many people were saying like, oh yeah, but you haven't showed this in data. And I'm saying like, well, I've read like hundreds of earnings calls and corporate leaders are saying it. They are stating it.
Vass Bednar [00:14:43] How much clearer could you be?
Isabella Weber [00:14:44] Sentences like, how are we going to respond to these cost increases? Obviously, like everybody else, by increasing prices and taking margin wherever we can. Right. This is obviously not a verbatim quote, but these kind of statements are all over the place. And they- by the way, not only earnings calls, they are also often in business.
Vass Bednar [00:15:02] Magazines. Yeah.
Isabella Weber [00:15:03] Business TV shows like CEOs have been saying this like literally on live TV. Right.
Vass Bednar [00:15:09] How are we supposed to interpret that? Is that just business at the end of the day?
Isabella Weber [00:15:15] Well, I mean, that kind of gets us into the debate around greed and greedflation and so on. I am a bit wary of the term greedflation, because it can kind of suggest that this inflation was triggered by a sudden spike in immoral behavior on the part of corporate leaders, which of course is a bad theory, because where should this have come from? Like is this a side effect of Covid or? It's like, of course this is obviously a bad theory. So instead what I would say is that firms in a capitalist market economy are set up to make profits. That's their primary goal. So they are going to pursue profit with whatever tools are available to them. Under normal circumstances, where there is no shock that coordinates this kind of price behavior firms cannot take prices in this way because they will lose market share and hence undermine the ability of making profits. So basically, the self-confidence that we get from these earnings calls is a self-confidence of corporate leaders saying we are taking price because we can. Right?
Vass Bednar [00:16:19] Right. Now you've popularized the term sellers inflation, and you mentioned some of the other words that are kind of in the sellers inflation family, greedflation, price gouging, price fixing, profiteering. What is it that all of these terms are trying to really get at?
Isabella Weber [00:16:37] Sellers inflation is actually a term from the economist Abba Lerner. So we kind of took a term that is from the history of thought. I'm originally a historian of economic thought, so that was close to my heart. Clearly, greedflation is the much catchier term. Clearly, this is the term that ultimately broke through in the media discourse and has resulted often in this, I think not always fully honest interpretation of greedflation. I think that all of these terms, at the end of the day, are getting at a phenomenon where in a situation of extreme crisis, disaster and emergency inflation occured because firms could increase prices in ways in which they cannot increase prices at normal times. And as a result of these price increases, they have reaped record profits. So basically this is an inflation that is driven by major shocks that have created a temporary corporate power that has been rather astonishing, and that has resulted in profits being an important part of this inflation.
Vass Bednar [00:17:44] You chose the word "honest" very carefully. Do you think we're having dishonest conversations under the greedflation umbrella, or what did you mean by that?
Isabella Weber [00:17:55] Well, I think that a lot of the debate around greedflation became very heated.
Vass Bednar [00:18:00] Whose fault is that?
Isabella Weber [00:18:03] I'm not trying to blame anyone here, but I think that often the debate was not necessarily in good faith. For example, one of the most favored metaphors used here is to say that blaming inflation on greed is like blaming an airplane crash on gravity. To which I would actually respond. Well, that is actually not a bad metaphor, if we add that obviously gravity's always there, right? So we need to understand what it is that broke the engine of the plane. Right? Which resulted in basically the force of competition that would in normal times keep the airplane up in the air failing, and therefore allowing for this kind of pricing behavior that we've seen.
Vass Bednar [00:18:52] So in that viral piece, you wrote that economists are and it seems like they still are kind of divided into these two camps in terms of how this period of inflation will play out and why. And the two teams, not sure who their mascots are, team transitory and team stagflation. Can you just briefly elaborate on the perspectives of these teams?
Isabella Weber [00:19:11] Yeah. So team stagflation is basically team Larry Summers, right?
Vass Bednar [00:19:18] And by Larry Summers, you mean the prominent Harvard economist who advised Clinton and Obama.
Isabella Weber [00:19:24] Yeah. So this is basically a very standard understanding of inflation, like from a textbook perspective, where inflation results from acts as aggregate demand. So therefore you have to hike interest rates the day before yesterday. I mean as soon as you can and basically push down the whole economy, cool down the labor market to get inflation under control. Now the problem with this from where I stand is that, I think there have been three stages in this inflation process. The first is an impact stage where we have seen these costs explosions in upstream stuff like energy, like food, like transportation. The second stage is the sellers inflation stage, where firms have reacted to these cost increases by protecting margins in ways that ultimately ended up increasing profits. And then the third stage is workers fighting back, because in stage one and two, they have lost purchasing power and they have become poorer. So eventually they will be fighting back and asking for higher wages. Now, the recipe of responding to the inflation that we have seen by hiking interest rates, or possibly even imposing fiscal austerity, basically aims to prevent the wage catch up, which means that you end up creating an extremely unequal situation in a politically already enormously fragile kind of environment, and economically, of course, also very fragile environment. Because if you end up withdrawing all this purchasing power from people's pockets, the recovery will be difficult, right? So Team Transitory was saying that we should not jump to hiking interest rates because this would sooner or later go away by itself because it came out of these sector specific price increases. So therefore we shouldn't worry too much and we should basically lean back and wait and see. Now, I would say that if I have to choose between hiking interest rates in an aggressive way and imposing macroeconomic austerity or doing nothing, I would of course be for doing nothing. But I would argue that we can do more than waiting for this storm to pass, but we can try to find ways to navigate this storm and to contain some of the harm that inflation brings, both in economic and political terms, by trying to do sectorally targeted policies, but also by doing things like windfall profit taxes for sectors where we have seen massive profit increases.
Vass Bednar [00:21:44] So I think I know which team Canada is on. In Canada, from a policy perspective, we have been focusing more on workers than on corporations as we try to tame inflation. Why do you think there's a preference for this more painful way of bringing down inflation by increasing unemployment numbers? And given that there's kind of a wait and see with this approach, how long should jurisdictions wait before they understand what they're seeing?
Isabella Weber [00:22:15] I mean, basically the big takeaway of the 1970s inflation was that ultimately one needed to increase interest rates like crazy, and that ultimately central banks were the key tool to deal with inflation. Now, this means that basically, the institutions that most countries have to respond to inflation are set up to fight an inflation that is driven by wages and that is driven by aggregate excess demand. So if you have your institution set up that way, then what happen in many situations is that if you hammer everything that you see looks like a nail, that kind of thing, right? Because the people in charge of inflation are the people at the central bank. What can they do? Well, they can increase interest rates, right? That's basically what they are set up to do. They don't have tools to do any of the sectorally targeted interventions. They don't have the power to introduce windfall profit taxes and so on. Right. So as a result, I think that's been the dominant response in most countries. So I think first of all, we have to acknowledge that, of course, the last couple of years were rather extraordinary, but that I think we are not on our way back to the stable, normal times of pre-COVID. But we are living in a world of overlapping emergencies. We are living in a world where shocks have become more likely. We don't know when they're going to hit, we don't know where they're going to hit, but we can be fairly certain that there are more shocks to come, right? So if this is the situation you are in, I think the question that one has to ask is what are the shocks that really matter? What are the points of vulnerability in our economic system that when you get a price spike in these points, you have the potential for inflation? That's what we have been trying to do in input output research where we have been modeling this and simulating shocks and trying to look at which shocks have the greatest potential to generate inflation.
Vass Bednar [00:24:16] I would say Canada is pretty stressed, right? We are experiencing a productivity crisis that the Bank of Canada called a national emergency. We're desperate to grow our economy. I don't even think that's an overstatement. And there are economists who will say that there's no problem with record profits during inflation, and that even suggesting an intervention that would curtail profit in any way will hurt our economy and then hurt our growth. And that's actually what hurts people. What do you say to them?
Isabella Weber [00:24:46] Well, if we respond to inflation by hiking interest rates, we are making investments more expensive. And this means that we are pushing down the investment rate in the economy at a moment where we need growth and we do not just need growth in general, but we need green growth, right? We need a growth that has a direction. All of these things have very high upfront costs because in the case of renewables, you first have to build a wind park and then eventually it produces wind and then the marginal cost is basically close to zero. But the upfront cost is very high. For electric vehicle because you have to first build a new infrastructure, which means that for a lot of the green investments that we urgently need for both growth as well as a planet that sustains life. Which last time I checked, I think is a precondition for growth. So for that, we cannot afford these very high interest rates. Right. So this is the first thing I would say. The second thing I would say is that if you have a situation where firms have learned that when supply chains break and they can not deliver the stuff that they are supposed to deliver, that this is a situation where they are making record profits. This is not a great incentive for firms to invest in resilience, to invest in better supply chains, to invest in more competitive products, because what they have learned is that in this situation of the breakdown of of the market, they actually benefited in extraordinary ways. In ways that ultimately, I would argue, in many cases, were windfall profits that they received without anything that they did wonderfully. Right. So this is not profits on great entrepreneurship. This is not profits on innovation. This is not profits for being ahead of the curve. This is basically almost more like rents, right?
Vass Bednar [00:26:34] Why are people coming around to this idea of strategic price controls?
Isabella Weber [00:26:41] I would say that the energy crisis of 2022 was really the turning point, because it became clear that these kind of price explosions in a good like gas that is so central to both production and basic human well-being for heating and washing and so on. In this moment, it became clear that neither households nor firms were in a position to absorb these price explosions. When I was serving on the Commission for the German government, where we were trying to do gas price stabilization in the fall of 2022, so this was more than half a year after the Russian attack on on Ukraine, there were literally like representative of the landlords sitting in the room with almost tears in his eyes, saying that people just can't pay these utility bills. We are walking towards a situation where people will have to choose between paying rent and paying utilities, right? So you are in a situation where basically you have a cost explosion that is in a thing that people cannot do without. And in that kind of situation, a price intervention becomes the logical step to take, because at the end of the day, the question is who can pay for this cost, right? And the state can pay for this costs in ways in which individual firms and individual households cannot.
Vass Bednar [00:28:01] You've been speaking to policymakers all around the world, and you were a member of the German government's Gas Price Commission. So when your parents or friends save money on their gas bill in Germany, do they send you a thank you card?
Isabella Weber [00:28:15] I mean, the German government since has actually stopped this policy after the gas prices came down, which I think was not very wise. But in any case, I did meet more than one person like, I don't know, random people that I talked to, a waiter or a taxi driver, or a hairdresser, who did make the connection and were extremely happy. And of course, my family and friends did celebrate, they gave me the funny title of Gazpromi. So
Vass Bednar [00:28:41] What does that mean?
Isabella Weber [00:28:43] "Promi" in German, it's like someone who is famous.
Vass Bednar [00:28:45] Oh, cool.
Isabella Weber [00:28:46] And Gazprom is, of course, a Russian company, so they were making fun of me like you are Gazpromi. You became famous through through gas.
Vass Bednar [00:28:54] Well, speaking of becoming famous, you're still tweeting. I want to know how social media is different for you, since you wrote that viral piece, and how that experience maybe has changed how and when you write, if at all.
Isabella Weber [00:29:08] Yeah. I'd say that Twitter is generally a pretty different place now than it was back then, but I am definitely much, much more cautious. I am much more thoughtful. I mean, now it's I'm kind of over it, but there was a long period where I was pretty anxious. But I also want to stress that actually the storm that happened didn't come from my Twitter presence. It came really through the Guardian article, right? I actually did a completely boring tweet about the article. That was I kind of, oh, I wrote something about something, right? Type of thing, like completely boring. So it wasn't like I unleashed a storm by tweeting something in a way that would have rubbed people in the wrong way, but it was really the article itself, and in particular the headline. When all of this started, I had like a few thousand followers and now I have more than 60,000 followers. Right? So suddenly I have, I mean, I'm not Paul Krugman with 4.5 million or whatever, how many followers he has now, but I'm still like suddenly an account that has a certain presence. Right? What I'm trying to get at here is that I think that there is an enormous power hierarchy on social media between accounts, with a lot of followers and accounts with little followers. And I think the more followers you have, the more responsibility you have. It's no longer you talking with someone in a group chat with your friends, even if it might feel that way because it's on your phone and you're just switching between WhatsApp and this other app. But the reach is extraordinary. And this also means that the potential harm can be quite extraordinary, as can be the benefit.
Vass Bednar [00:30:46] Well, your research is the receipts here, right? What does it all mean for people who may want to put their hands up and share a perspective? What would you say to people listening that want to challenge conventional norms with a new idea or a proposal?
Isabella Weber [00:31:02] Yeah. So I've been thinking about that a lot actually, especially in the first months after the storm, because I felt like if I had seen what happened to me, I probably would not have written this article, right? I probably would have just not stuck my head out and said something that was trying to push the boundary. So part of me keeping up the fight, and part of me sticking with my analysis and fighting it through and trying to show the world that I had a point, and celebrating that important institutions came around in their analysis to finding things that are very similar to what I have been arguing, an IMF study, for example, a speech by the ECB President Lagarde, and so on. Right. I think the conversation has been changed to a certain degree, and I have been, I guess, vindicated. So that was really important for me. I would not recommend people to just withdraw from social media, but I would recommend people to think of social media as basically a tool that one is using. And I think that for people who want to push the boundary in public debates, it's very important to think about who your allies are before you go out with something that is controversial, which is something that I didn't do at all. I mean, The Guardian published it and whatever-.
Vass Bednar [00:32:22] You just went skiing.
Isabella Weber [00:32:23] Exactly, I went skiing. I had no plan. I had- I also had no idea of what was coming. But at the end of the day, it's kind of a battlefield. It's not a physical, it's a virtual battlefield. So you want to have people who speak up for you, because if you are under this kind of attack, you basically lose your voice. Like whatever you say is not going to be heard anymore, is not going to be taken seriously anymore because you are being delegitimized in a pretty fundamental way. So I would encourage people to put their ideas out. I would encourage people to think about who their allies are, and to think about how they can use social media as a tool in pursuit of whatever they're trying to achieve.
Vass Bednar [00:33:04] Doctor Isabella Weber, thank you so much.
Isabella Weber [00:33:06] Thank you so much for having me.
Vass Bednar [00:33:21] You've been listening to Lately, a Globe and Mail podcast. Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Andrea Varsany and our sound designer is Cameron McIver. I'm your host, Vass Bednar. And in our show notes, you can subscribe to the Lately newsletter, where we unpack a little more of the latest in business and technology. A new episode of Lately comes out every Friday. Wherever you get your podcasts.