Annie Lowrey on the Time Tax, Fraud, and Rationing by Paperwork

21:07Tyler Cowen:This is a small thing, but it bugs me all the time. I'm on a purely private sector website. I can't blame the government at all. And it turns out I already have an account at the website and I try to register as a guest. And it's never that simple. No. Why does this go wrong? Why is this not fixed in a world with AI agents? I'm convinced that white collar technology, labor saving stuff, I'm convinced it's all Jevons paradoxical. I think that basically anything that is designed like email to make your life easier will at some point make it worse. We've made it so that it just multiplies. The number of tasks, the things that companies can do to you multiplies.

21:52I do not want to use pass keys. And it feels like private companies are just hellbent on, I don't want to know what a pass key is. And they're hellbent on getting you to use them. It's absolutely nutty. And the password managers, but then you have to manage the manager. It's all a lot.

22:09Tyler Cowen:If I travel to Harvard and maybe I bought a plane ticket for$400 and I can get reimbursement. That is hell. That's one of the worst private sector experiences I have, is learning a new software system to be reimbursed for a small sum of money and having to go through all rigmarole. Yes, and exactly. And there's some amount that you just won't do it because you value your own time and your blood pressure, right? It's absolutely annoying. There were these rules that used to make airlines reimburse you if they bounced you off a plane, that's gone. anything having to do with airlines. And they're like, oh, you hadn't, you know, we've severely inconvenienced you.

22:49So we've given you some miles that probably you'll never, some credit or something. It's like, just give people, this is the first book, give people money, give them cash. They like that.

22:58Tyler Cowen:Now, government virtually by definition operates at scale, unless it's say a small town. How long will it be before AI agents are just built to do almost all of this for us? and you just say to your agent, hey, fill out this benefits form, and then you go away, you go to sleep, and it's done. Won't that happen within five years? I imagine so. The questions that I have are, one, are the lower income people who are the users of the most burdensome programs, do they know about those agents? Do they feel comfortable using them? I don't know. Not now, right? But say within five years. Yeah, definitely.

23:33Tyler Cowen:If it's just a pure gain. The second thing is that a lot of it is not really paperwork, right? It's mandatory interviews. It's urine screens. It's collecting data that might be hard to collect and answering questions that an AI agent might not be able to answer for you. So, for instance, unlike other programs, so jobless benefits are given to the individual, right? It's state and individual. Snap benefits depend on your household. And so you, in some cases, will have to say how you split up the cost of staples with the people in your house. And it's really hard because the government doesn't have a stable definition of what a household is.

24:11And it can be very hard to say who is in your household and how you're splitting things up. And so I think that AI will help with a lot of this. And I was kind of skeptical, but the best civic technologist I know thinks that it'll help a lot. And he's a guy who's been in the muck of this for a really long time and knows this better than the technology part of it. And he's convinced that AI will help. I don't know.

24:35Tyler Cowen:And the AI can interview you and say, well, please tell me these things. I'm going to need it to answer the questions for your SNAP benefit. And you intermediate to the AI, which is nicer, friendly or easier to deal with. And then it deals with the nasty person in the government. Yes. And very often the government will ask you a question in a way that some lawyer wrote in some very legalistic fashion. And I think that the AI is unusually good at saying, oh, this is what they're actually asking and this is what the general advice is for how to do that. A very big picture question. Fertility rates are low in the U.S., lower elsewhere.

25:12Tyler Cowen:They're not going to pop up anytime very soon. So the future of this country, it really depends on the quality of the immigrants we attract. If we have a welfare system where it's really hard to get benefits, don't we, in fact, attract a higher quality of immigrant, more ambitious people, more self-sustaining than if benefits are just easy to get? And isn't the significance of that really quite large in the future where native fertility is so low? Why do you think it is that if we have such a clunky system now, we've managed to attract such a good quality of immigrant thus far? because people who want to come just to get the benefit might say oh in europe they'll just hand me the money give me the free apartment put me up in the hotel but you come to the u.s it's a huge pain right yeah but maybe there's a wisdom in that i my understanding was that the welfare magnet hypothesis didn't pan out right it makes some sense but i think that the issue is like can you actually get here and come here is a big problem and then you're barred from accessing the safety net as an immigrant, right?

26:19For long periods.

26:20Tyler Cowen:Or much of it. Yeah, not all of it. Yeah, not all of it. And your children, especially if they're born here, they have access. So there's that. I just think that there's probably better ways to... In general, I think the policies work well when they have a direct goal rather than relying on indirect mechanisms like these, if we want to attract more and better immigrants, why don't we just create policies that will get them to come here, right? So like if you get your PhD here, you automatically get a green card, that kind of thing. I think that that would lead a lot of immigrants to come back.

27:01Tyler Cowen:But the current system, it selects for people having a kind of stamina, conscientiousness, focus, drive, willing to put up with indignities and smart enough to get through the systems that may not be in their language. You could argue what we have is those policies. And I know plenty of lazy PhDs, right? I mean, most PhDs are lazy, I would say. So I don't want that to be the standard. Of course they are. It's become negative selection relative to IQ. Huh. How would you, so what is the population of people that you're looking to? You're looking for entrepreneurial people with a lot of get up and go, people who can make it through the maze that we have set up.

27:46Tyler Cowen:More O1s and then somewhat reform HB and have more of them and none of this crazy$100 ,000 fee. I think that you could, you know, if you're thinking that the H1B and the O1 is working well, why not just make those much, much, much, much, much bigger programs? Oh, of Of course, but keep the benefits tough and stingy or in some cases impossible, which is not a time tax. If you know you can't get it, you don't bother to apply. It's like a time tax in the sense that it keeps you away from the benefit. Right. I just don't think that you should be creating chaos and taking people's time by making the actual administrative part of it difficult.

28:25I think there's always many other ways to get the policy outcome that you are searching for. right, than larding the government up. It means it's hard. It means that the government is wasting more money, right? Your overhead cost is going to be higher. And I know that immigration is financing, right, because we're self-financing because we are applying these fees. But nevertheless, I just think that there's better ways to go about it.

28:51Tyler Cowen:Here's a question from a reader, which I'm paraphrasing. Sure. Do you favor much easier access to benefits, but randomized, harsh, credible punishments for offenders. So you audit one in every hundred, every thousand applications. If the person did something wrong, you come down on them really hard. So the time tax mostly vanishes, but there's still this somewhat arbitrary punishment meted out to some of the people who are frauds. I think you have to separate out the issue of improper payments from purposeful fraud. Improper payments are a function of the complexity of the system, right? If the system were easier and the rules were more straightforward and you weren't asking people who don't own a computer for their monthly gross income and also their net income over the past six months, and that's really hard to do, and, you know, a million other little questions, the improper payment rate would go down if the government were doing more work and the rules were simpler.

29:53You would also have lower bureaucratic costs. So, yes, I absolutely support making the rules much simpler, much simpler. And maybe that means that you have to adjust the benefit threshold, right? Meaning that you get it and then auditing on the back end. I don't know that I think that you have to have obscenely harsh punishment, though. Why do you need the harsh punishment as opposed to the auditing and the threat of that and, you know, the threat of civil penalties?

30:20Tyler Cowen:Well, if you only audit one in 5 ,000, people will think, oh, I can get away with it. The punishment needs to really be harsh to scare them off. Yeah, I think you could just do more reasonable audits, right? I don't necessarily think that you need to have extremely harsh punishments for this kind of thing. Also, you know, for fraud, you have to show that people intended to, intent is important, right? Show that they intended, they knew that they didn't have access to the benefit. They knew that they put the wrong paperwork in there. As a general point, I think that the benefit fraud rate is quite low.

30:52I'm not concerned that we're losing too much money to fraud.

30:56Tyler Cowen:Now, from 1990 to 2014, the number of people on disability insurance, it increased by about 4x. Even though jobs got safer, the number of people killed by their job went down steadily. Does that not mean that disability insurance should just be much tougher to get, more bureaucracy, more standards, more process, more whatever? Yes. So I think that there were some reasons that more Americans became disabled. Population aging is one. The general rise of chronic health conditions related to obesity is another. And so I think that we should be somewhat more neutral in saying, you know, is it people defrauding the system just because that number has gone up so much?

31:44I don't think so. I don't think so. Disability is extraordinarily onerous to apply for and has very, very stringent fraud checks already. You know, in 5 % of applications, the applicant submits more than 1 ,000 pages of medical paperwork. It's a lot. 11 ,000 Americans die waiting on a disability determination each year. And yes, the caseload has gone up, but recently it's been going down. So I don't think that we're worrying that it's just going up and up and up and up and up.

32:17Tyler Cowen:Yeah, it's gone down a lot since 2014. Gone down a lot, right? The job market got better as part of it. I worry that we are giving benefits to people who are not disabled and do not need them. I also worry that we are denying benefits to people who actually do. So I don't know that I see a strong case for making disability much more burdensome as opposed to, you know, looking for other ways to help the system. Disability, I do think that it's a program that is extremely important. It is the only long-term help for people who are impaired in their ability to work. But it's, you know, and it's an extremely burdensome program for the government to manage.

32:58So I don't know that I see the case for adding paperwork to it at this juncture.

33:05Tyler Cowen:If I look at governments where processes seem pretty straightforward, they very often seem to have smaller populations, say below 20 million. Now, I'm not sure what is causing what here, but what do you think is the exact reason why small population is correlated with better processes? Is it less federalism? Is it somehow the smaller number of people? They feel more cooperative or is it something else? Do you have a view on that? Yeah, I think it's in some cases federalism. I think it's homogeneity. You know, Finland, it's basically mostly ethnically Finnish people. The United States is quite unusual in our ethnic and racial diversity.

33:47And I think that that is actually when you're thinking about small nations, they tend to be fairly racially, ethnically homogenous. It feels like there's higher social trust. Functionally, everybody is related to one another. Right. That's really not true in the United States.

34:01Tyler Cowen:Should the U.S. have less federalism? Yes. And is there a way I'm not saying it's practical in the sense of getting support, but some way you could bring that about? Absolutely. And what would it be? I would take everything just about I think that there is the case for local control of certain things, some things policing, sewers. Makes sense, right? We need to do that locally. I think that for the administration of mass programs, the federal government, if it is legally possible to have the federal federal government do it, the federal government should be doing it. For one, people move from state to state and locality to locality constantly.

34:42It makes sense if you have a jobless insurance program or similar to administer it. There's just the simple multiplicity effect. We have more than 100 TANF programs. We have 56 Medicaid programs. In terms of overhead, it just makes sense to have one. The federal government doesn't have a balanced budget role. They every year now spend more than they take in in tax revenue. And I think that generally federal programs are better managed. Not always, but generally, yes.

35:14Tyler Cowen:Should Brooklyn be a separate city from the rest of New York? No, but I don't know about Staten Island. I was just going to ask you about Staten Island. New Jersey is clamoring for it, right? I think so. I guess that the people of Staten Island should self-determine. And what do you think they would do? I don't know. I don't know, actually. I need to go over there and do some surveying and knocking on doors. I haven't been there in like 20 years. Is there Sri Lankan food? Is that the reason to go? Yeah, Sri Lankan food. I took the ferry. It costs$0. And you go there and back. And it's a perfect happy hour.

35:57So I did that recently, but I'm not the time I was there. The before that I've not spent a lot of time on Staten Island was I was reporting there a couple of years ago. But I don't look, I don't I don't have strong views on Staten Island. I think it's great. I also feel like I haven't been in New York for long enough to to be able. I'm not a New Yorker, right? Like I can't set policy for New York. Brooklyn, Brooklyn feels like it should be part of New York to me now living in Brooklyn. Yeah.

36:27Tyler Cowen:There's a theme recurring through your book in a number of different places that it's too hard to vote. Yes. Now, I'm of the view that it should not be that easy to vote, at least in the United States. What exactly is the gain we get from having more people vote, given that, for instance, people didn't even know what the child tax credit was, even if they were receiving it? Don't we just get better outcomes if, say, only half the people vote, which, of course, will skew toward the more educated? I don't think so. I think that democracy is important for reasons of principle that are more important than policies.

37:05Tyler Cowen:But I'm all for democracy, right? There's no country where you can vote by just leaning back on your sofa and screaming out whom you favor. There's some cost. You can set the cost where you want. Americans today seem fine with the costs being higher than in many places. You make the costs lower, you get inferior outcomes, right? Including on the issues you care about. I don't know that I think that that's true. Do we know that? Maybe no is too strong a word, but we know that more educated people make better voting choices than less educated people, on average. I think that I just have a principled—my view is only principled.

37:42I don't care about outcomes. I think if you're a democracy, people should be able to vote.

37:47Tyler Cowen:Oh, sure, they should be able to, but how easily, right? As easily as possible. So you would, even in countries with high voter participation rates, like subsidize voting, give everyone a free ride, do whatever was necessary. Yes, I think so. And I think when you look at countries with very high voter participation rates, do you think that they have worse outcomes? Or do you just think that their polities are different, such that you end up with different policies? Voting is compulsory in some places. They tend to be better educated at the lower end, for one thing. Right. Then I think that you, again, you just want to do more education.

38:25You want to make it easier for people to go to school. You don't want to make it hard for them to vote.

38:30Tyler Cowen:I'm all for making school easier. Now, you have an earlier book called Give People Money, which is basically pro-UBI, to oversimplify a bit. Indeed. There have been UBI studies since then. How does your current view differ from your earlier view? I think that the studies have been sobering and I have changed my priors. And I think that some of the ancillary benefits that I thought that we could see through cash haven't materialized. And I take that seriously. I think that there is still a case for doing it. The point of giving people money is to give them money so that they can buy things. And I think that the case for that remains and I think is non-corrupted, that their lives don't improve as much as I would have thought, I think isn't necessarily a case against a policy.

39:21Tyler Cowen:There's an argument that your earlier argument is stronger than you thought. So say AI truly is a big deal. Yes. And we all live to 100. But day to day, we're not really happier per se because of AI. This, to me, is one plausible scenario. I'm not sure it will happen, but it could happen. And then the purpose of UBI is not to make people happier, but just to stop them from being less happy due to instability. Yes. So the only benchmark is, can UBI keep people where they were at on some dimensions, and they still get to live to 100, which, of course, they want. And then overall, it's just a way of making the system stable.

40:00Yeah, absolutely. You know, when I wrote the prior book, the AIs that were out were garbage. And it was really not clear that they would ever get to the place that people said that they would get. I remember even when I first moved out to the Bay Area in 2018, you would talk to people who did AI work. And they seemed like religious zealots in some ways.

40:26Tyler Cowen:Seemed like. Yeah. They'd be like, you know, they'd be like, no, I promise it's going to change everything I've seen inside the machine. And I'd be like, OK, buddy, sure. Great. You know, the computer is not really better and they aren't really getting better. And this is, you know, a time of really remarkably little technological progress. And so I was I was very wrong about that and really found chat GPT remarkable when I got access to it. And I do. I was extremely dismissive at the time of the notion that AIs would necessitate UBI. And I don't know that I would go so far as to say that I think that we'll need a UBI because of AI.

41:02But I certainly think that we should be starting to think about that kind of policy if the improvements that we're seeing continue forward and if there is a lot of pressure on the white collar workforce, which, you know, I think we won't know for a couple of years. But yes, I think that if we see a situation in which GDP is radically increasing, productivity is increasing, and unemployment is going up, that would be very strange. And I think we would have to start looking at UBI type functions.

41:31Tyler Cowen:Are raccoons evolving into pets? No, they are not. Should they? No. Should more things be pets or fewer things be pets? Fewer things. I also don't think... So no tigers? No, I don't think that you should be able to have a non-domesticated animal as a pet. This is one of my strongest held and probably least popular positions. And that means that I do not think that you should be able to have sugar gliders. I do not think you should be able to have most types of fish. I don't think you should be able to keep birds. And that would be federal or local governments doing that? Well, federal. Non-domesticated birds, I should say.

42:09You can have chickens. Chickens are domesticated. But, you know, tropical birds, I don't think you should be able to keep.

42:15Tyler Cowen:Why are you visiting Namibia? The Namib Desert. I'm very, very excited to see petroglyphs. As a general point, I organize a lot of my travel around deserts and moss to see those. So I'm very, very excited. I'm very excited for dark skies. I haven't been, I've been to South Africa, but I haven't traveled extensively in that region. You said moss, M-O-S-S? Moss. Where is the best place in the world to go see moss? Outside of the Pacific. The Pacific Northwest, I think, is the best moss that I have seen in the United States. My understanding is that there are places in Japan that have extraordinary moss.

42:56I have only ever been to Tokyo. Have you been to mossy places in Japan? You're better traveled than I am.

43:02Tyler Cowen:I think in retrospect, they seemed mossy, but I wasn't very aware of it at the time. You're not a moss traveler. Have you been to the Sundabarans? I don't know how to say that. The mangrove forest in Bangladesh? No, never been to Bangladesh at all, I'm sorry to say. I haven't either, and I very much want to go. Why do you like architectural brutalism? Oh, I just find it visually interesting and beautiful. I like to feel tiny in front of buildings. And I like the idea of creating warm spaces within imposing structures that make you feel uncomfortable. It's like the Jolie-led of architecture. My favorite brutalism is in former communist countries.

43:46Tyler Cowen:Do you have a favorite brutalism? Boston City Hall. Okay. It's really ugly. Why are tattoos so popular now, including with women? For the same reason we scribble on cave walls. But one of those is your body, and it's still somewhat hard to reverse, right? Yeah, it's reversible. It can take 12 sessions to get it off, and it hurts. It's reversible, but, you know, and I actually think that the capacity to remove tattoos, while wonderful for some people who have a tattoo that is prohibiting them from getting employment, reminding them of something painful or, you know, goodness forbid, if you have hate speech or similar on your body, I think it's good that you can take the tattoo off.

44:27But in general, I think that the idea of having and then removing tattoos is not good for tattoo culture. I have tattoos, and I think that they're a really nice reminder of time and place. They're permanent ephemera.

44:41Tyler Cowen:You recently read a book called A History of Christianity. Which one was it and what was interesting in the book to you? So this was A History of Christianity the first 3 ,000 years. One of the things that really stuck with me was that I, despite being Catholic, had not entirely internalized that Christians start off as like a strange, tiny Jewish sect of people that are found to be often kind of like mentally unstable and deeply annoying. And this book communicates that. Indeed. Judaism is not the predominant mode of worship or culture at the time. And Christianity, which then comes to dominate so much of the globe, starts off as like an offshoot of that, of people who are insisting that they are seeing apparitions and people walking through walls.

45:38It's a very, very, very good book.

45:40Tyler Cowen:And how essential do you view Christianity to Western liberalism? When you say essential, do you mean positive or do you just mean influential? Influential but positive. The notion that Jesus Christ was an individual. It's a story very different from might makes right. We valorize the victim. It easily translates into talk of individual rights and liberties and constitutional procedures. At least that has been argued. Yes, I agree with that, but I certainly don't see Christianity as essential to enlightenment or good governance in any way, shape or form. Like, I do think that it had that effect, but I don't think that it would be necessary in some other world.

46:31Tyler Cowen:But not that many Christian countries have achieved the same, right? You could say Japan has for a while. Yeah, I was going to say Japan? Yeah, that's one. South Korea? South Korea is pretty Christian in terms of actual belief. Did it inform the structure of government, though? I don't know. That's an actual question. I don't know enough about it. I've been to South Korea, but I don't know that much. But other than Japan, I see very few examples. Yeah. I don't know. I would have to think about it more. It's also, there's just, there's so much Christianity. It gets so everywared that I don't know.

47:07I'm not sure.

47:09Tyler Cowen:I tend to worry quite a bit now that we are genuinely less Christian, that this will hurt the chances of liberalism in our future. I think that that might be right. I'm not saying when I'm talking about the church, the political actor, the church, which obviously has a very checkered history. But I do think that it was good that you had an institution that was so predominant in people's lives reminding them of the importance of sin and of being a person of integrity and caring for the neighbor. Although then again, the world has become, right, as it's become less Christian, it's become, you know, safer, right?

47:58More redistributive. So I'm not really sure.

48:00Tyler Cowen:What do you think of Rothdoth's famous comment? It's something like, well, if you don't like the Christian right, wait till you see the post-Christian right? Which he said some while ago, right? Yeah, I think that that's completely accurate. And I think that our most notable Christians are not particularly Christian right now. Again, as a Catholic, the notion of being yelled at specifically by two successive popes, as J.D. Vance has been, it's tough to imagine that. It'd be very painful. Other than facts about Moss, what is it you think you learn when you travel? Oh, goodness. In some ways, I feel like the emergence of a global monoculture, this idea of it, I do think that that shows up especially in urban places.

48:49I think that it is really, really important to recognize your own privilege and to see how other people live. I think it's important in the sense of trusting that people know what they value and value very, very, very different things than you do. it slows time down, which is a big thing for me. The time I spend traveling seems to go like 20 times as slowly as an average day in the office. And I really, really like that telescoping effect. And I look for non-drug ways for that to happen.

49:23Tyler Cowen:Could you name a city that you feel more or less successfully rebels against the global monoculture, but it's not just a complete wreck. So you could say Lagos, but Lagos is a complete wreck, right? A well-run city that avoids the traps of many places where every coffee shop looks the same or whatever. Hmm. That's a great question. A lot of the traveling I do is for outdoors stuff. And I do think that the global monoculture and Instagram has been very terrible for that, for opening beautiful places up to people who just want to take photographs and leave. is really, really awful. And there, I understand the sort of it's the you're not in traffic, you are traffic phenomenon.

50:06But I really mean people who are desecrating these places that are very fragile ecosystems and where you do want to meter access and you do want people to, for instance, take out their trash and understand what to do if you encounter a wild animal and that kind of thing. But in terms of a city that feels really, really wildly different, you know, I just think that there's lots of places I go that there's no tourists. And they're wonderful for that. When I report, even more so than being a tourist, being a reporter is like the best way to find someplace because I'm always amazed by how much people tell you about their lives and show you about their lives.

50:44And you really get to see life on the edge of Lake Victoria or very close to the India-Bangladesh border. Sort of similarly, going to weddings abroad is another way to do that if you ever get invited to a wedding. One of my favorite weddings that I went to was in Pakistan, which I never would have gone to Pakistan, I think, without that. Or maybe I would have, but it was a perfect way to get a glimpse of Pakistani society.

51:09Tyler Cowen:That, for me, is a case where the private sector time tax is too high. Yes. Oh, wow. If it were a half-day wedding, I would go. But a three-day wedding in South Asia, I just feel, no, I'll be wanting to check my email the whole time. Oh, yeah. No, no, no. They really, really do weddings well. I would also note that Pakistan, I believe, has much heavier time taxes than we do. There's a lot of interesting thinking about post-colonial states and paperwork burdens. There's a good book that I read about Pakistan that I forget the exact title, but it was about Pakistan's issues with paperwork and the transition from British rule to self-rule.

51:45Tyler Cowen:Should friendships have explicit time taxes? For instance, people from the Soviet Union, they often expect their friends to pick them up from the airport. Oh, I love that. Even though that's not a thing anymore, you can just Uber taxi. It doesn't matter if your income is high enough. It's expected that someone goes to pick you up. Is that good, bad? Yes. There's no inconvenience in friendship if the point is to do things and spend time together. And I note that I think the best way to make friends is not to make yourself available for what other people need, but to ask for help. I remember like one escalation of a friendship that happened to me recently.

52:22My older son had had a dental procedure in the morning, and I needed to pick my younger son up from school. And my husband wasn't around and no childcare was around and my mom couldn't make it. But the older son was still, he needed an adult to be with him. And I couldn't leave him alone. And so I asked a friend to come over and sit with this kid who had just been given a large dose of ketamine for like 20 minutes. And I had a bunch of people say yes, and one friend came over and sat with my son in bed and looked at her phone for 20 minutes. And there is no inconvenience in friendship. People like to be asked to do things too, I think.

52:58Tyler Cowen:But that's useful, right? Say it's not really useful, that it's just an ongoing act of signaling to show you're a true friend. Oh, absolutely. Definitely, definitely, right? Because I think that the point is to spend time, certainly. Do you find that there are social conventions that you despise having to comply with in your life, but still have to do it? I don't know. I don't think ever despise, but there are various slight annoyances, or I wish things were more efficient. Yeah. The one that I really struggle with is that I have email and text and WhatsApp and Signal and lots of other modes, Instagram messages.

53:36And I really, really despise having to keep up with people on all of those forms of communication. And I think of texting as being fundamentally asynchronous and that you shouldn't a text. You shouldn't have to socially respond to a text. And I only like socializing in person. I want to see people. I want to be visually with them. And I hate all of the digital upkeep. And I'm really, really bad at it. And it's known among my friends that I'm bad at this. And even my husband is like, you're a terrible texter and you're kind of mean over text. And I'm like, well, I'm not trying to be mean. But I don't, you know, I don't.

54:08I just write like I text like a boomer, apparently.

54:11Tyler Cowen:My slight gripe is there's too many networks. So I feel there should be email and one system of texting. Yes. There's Signal, there's WhatsApp, there's iMessenger. It's too much. There's other stuff. There's Twitter direct message. Awful. I don't do social media anymore. So I don't do Twitter anymore at all. I have an Instagram account that I'm not on very often. I don't Facebook. I don't Blue Sky. And I really appreciate the time that I've gotten back from that. I think they're particularly acts, I think, as a terrible mode of discourse. And I think that it rewards unseemly emotions in people.

54:52Tyler Cowen:so just to finish up with the last question i asked this of many of the guests but first to mention your book again annie lowry the time tax how the government wastes our time and how to fix it what is it you wish to learn about next oh i actually i just got two books about the Mexica people, the Aztecs. So I'd like to read those books and then go see Aztec artifacts and structures. That's a Clendenin book or a lot of people have been reading that lately? Yeah, that was how I saw it was a lot of people were reading it. And now I'm like, who was it who recommended it? But I had wanted to do more travel in Mexico.

55:34So I got The Fifth Sun and then just Aztecs, I think, is the other one, which I'm excited to read. And actually, from your podcast, I got the book on Vermeer, which I'm excited. I know nothing about him, and I'm very excited to read that. Great.

55:48Tyler Cowen:Annie Larry, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowan, and the show is at Cowan Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.