Juliette Sellgren 

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. Hi, I'm Juliet Sellgren and this is my podcast, the Great Antidote- named for Adam Smith, brought to you by Liberty Fund. To learn more, visit wwwAdamSmithWorks.org. Welcome back. Today on April 17th, 2025. I'm really excited to welcome Justin Callais to the podcast. He is the chief economist at the Archbridge Institute and he received his PhD at Texas Tech. Today we're going to be talking about a bunch of different stuff, including probably mobility, prosperity, freedom, all those sorts of good things, and I'm excited to get into it. So welcome to the podcast.

Justin Callais 

Thank you, Juliette. I'm very excited. I've listened to a lot of episodes, so I'm very excited to be on this one.

Juliette Sellgren (1:05)

I'm very, very flattered. So let's get into it. The first question, what is the most important thing that people my age or my generation should know that we don't?

Justin Callais (1:16)

Okay, great. No, that's a really great question and I love that you start a lot of these podcasts with this question and in part because I'm not that much older than someone who's in undergrad right now, so I have a little bit of years of experience, but not enough to where it's too distant away. So I think if I could tell someone who's in a slightly younger generation than me, I'd basically just say it's all probably going to be okay. It's all going to be okay. I mean, I think a lot of people in my generation and younger have this kind of incessant pressure to try to solve all the world's problems or take on the burden of all the world's problems, but I think you can make meaningful impact as an individual, but that doesn't mean you need to be worried about every single possible thing going on in the world at every single possible time.

And I think a lot of that has to do with just taking an inward and then outward look on what can you actually accomplish and what can you actually solve. So I think personally I would say you should first focus on the self and the individual first, focus on yourself. If you cannot go out and solve problems, if you don't know where you are individually or personally, you need to work on yourself first before you can actually try to make those societal broader impacts. And then from there, taking an inward outward approach is focusing on the self first and focusing on what can you do to be better? What can you do to be okay? And then focusing on the things you can control more in groups next of, okay, smaller groups like your very close friends or your family members. Those are incredibly important parts of community, incredibly important parts of it's a lot more tangential and something you can tangibly control.

You can control. Are you a good friend? You can't control? Are you a caring member of your family? Are you taking care of the people around you? And then what sort of small incremental steps can you make to have some sort of impact outside of that? So I think in part of it, not to get too economists too early, but focus on what your comparative advantage is, right? Good at what do you believe in, what are you particularly passionate about? And try to focus on those things first rather than, because if you're trying to solve all the world's problems, you're going to inevitably always fall short. No one person can solve every single one of the world's problems. So if you're worried about every single one of them, you're not actually going to be able to accomplish. You're going to be constantly feeling like you're not fulfilled and you're going to be constantly worried about not actually succeeding when you can make very tangential successful steps in the process.

So success should be hard, but it shouldn't be miserable. So success should mean that you're trying to be get better every day and you're trying to make improvements, but you don't need to necessarily solve every single one of the problems again, then you're just going to be unfulfilled. You're just going to have an unfulfilled life and constantly feel like you're failing. Now, I don't want this to necessarily mean that you should solve something and then never do anything ever again, but it's more about solving what you can, controlling what you can control, and then trying to make those impacts elsewhere.

Juliette Sellgren (4:43)

This is great for so many reasons. I mean, first you are the only person I've ever heard say that this sort of feeling, this zeitgeist of how am I going to affect the world? What am I going to do next? Who am I? What do I do? This anxiety that it actually extends to anyone older than me effectively. I'm wondering why I, why do you think having spent more time on earth and probably thinking about this, what do you think the cause is? Everyone's blaming the phones, but if you feel it and it's maybe more of a cultural thing, I don't know. 

Justin Callais (5:36)

Well, I do. I don't necessarily just say it's the phones, but I do think there's something to the fact, to the that I don't remember. I mean, there wasn't much of my life where there was not the internet and the phones, right? I'm 29, so it's not like there's a huge gap of like, oh, computers are just ancient to me. They were kind of around and in the zeitgeist when I was growing up. But I do think obviously having global access to knowing about what's going on in all parts of the world is important. And I think it's great and I think it's one of the best benefits that we can feel so connected despite being geographically far away. But I think that, again, not to get too economists too early, but to all of this, and I think one of the tradeoffs is that because we know about all these certain aspects and everything that's kind of going on in the world, for the most part we feel like this sort of pressure to help or have some sort of solution to it.

And I think that's overall a good thing. I don't think that's a bad thing to want to help. I remember in high school, the first example I could think about this, which I don't know if this is probably happened too long ago for this to be relevant to you and maybe happened too late for this to be relevant to anyone older listening, but I'll mention it anyway, is the Stop Kony movement that happened in high school that there was this guy named Kony in Africa who was doing all of a bunch of basically kidnapping a bunch of children and running this basically autocratic cult going on. And that was the first tangible moment that I remember seeing that was people really wanted to, okay, we got to do something about this. This is this terrible thing that's happening, and we never heard anything about it again, there was going to be this Stop Kony day at some point in high school, and I don't really know what that even meant.

It just was a thing that happened. So I think in part taking it more broadly is the fact that we, because if you think about it, way back in the day when there weren't phones and there wasn't access to what's going on, you saw we have this kind of human part about us that wants to help, that wants to actually, we're not just individuals, we are part of a broader society. So you want to help. So if you were thinking let's say a hundred years ago or even 50 years ago, and you're walking down the street and you see someone in need of help, there's this kind of calling, natural calling to help, but now we're in a situation to where those callings to help are a much wider range. You would've only seen this if you're walking down the street or walking near in your neighborhood, or you heard from it on the newspaper or something.

But now over time, we're getting a larger and larger pool of things that you want to help. And there's this kind of incessant need, which I think is a good part of what makes us moral creatures, but is also could potentially be our downfall if we let it burden us too much of there's all of these problems going on. There's all of these issues. And I think especially people in my generation and your generation and younger, we haven't had the foresight of being able to see like, oh, well yes, it sounds like it might seem like the world's worse now today than it was 50 a hundred years ago. We see all these different problems, but we don't if the foresight or didn't have the knowledge or the time to see kind of, well, yes, there's a lot of issues going on, but the world is much, much better off than it was 50, a hundred even 20 years ago. And so I think there's just a big part of it that's just we want to help, but now we're at the point where we see so many different things going on because our knowledge base of what's going on in the world is much larger that we just can't get past the point of looking beyond that.

Juliette Sellgren (9:30)

I think there's another dimension that I recently realized to this time angle of we don't really, or at least haven't had the time to realize that time has existed for so long and that really it's going to be okay because it's always been okay. The other dimension is actually another numerical thing kind of, but it's just scale in terms of people. How much of an effect can you really have doing certain activities? I realized how many people lived in New York City probably last week actually for whatever reason, for the first time I've known it's available information. You can look it up, you can see it. You can know how many people live in New York City, but what does that concept look like? Can you conceptualize what that many people looks like, what that sort of society looks like, what that means in terms of how many people you could feasibly know or impact even on an interpersonal day-to-day interacting way?

I can imagine in New York, if you were to map a day or a week or a year, two people walking around and living and you can see their lives kind of intermingling in terms of where they've actually physically been in the city, but never in a million years would they meet. And there's something kind of crazy about, I remember a point where I couldn't imagine that sort of thing where now I walk through my hometown and I kind of acknowledge and kind of know that reasonably, not every single household has kids that have gone through the high schools that I went through, that everyone is kind of in a community in a different way. And that sounds kind of irrelevant, but if that's the case, then you as an individual can't just tweet something and impact everyone or actually make a change. It maybe gets to the impact point about making a meaningful kind of action product change that we're not that big. We're kind of price takers in terms of society and life because we're so small. We've existed for so little of the overall time that humans have existed and so much has happened and so much will continue to happen and it will all turn out to be okay in part because even though we can make change and there's a narrative that we are going to make the change and we're going to fix it and whatever, fix what, fix what, I don't know anything.

We can't really, and we especially can't do it alone. And I think there's something about that that has been really striking to me recently. I don't know.

Justin Callais (12:23)

No, absolutely. I mean, I completely agree. I mean, even just taking out the New York City example, so I'm from a town that's called Cut Off Louisiana, and I joke that it's called Cut Off Louisiana because cut off from much of the rest of the world geographically it it's in a parish, which is just a county everywhere else, but in Louisiana we call them parishes. That's a very tall, skinny parish. So it's one of the more south towns of that parish. And I mean even there's maybe 5,000 people that live there in that town. And even there when I go home and I'm just existing and going to the Walmart or the grocery store or wherever else in the town, there's so many people there who I have never seen once in my entire life. And despite it being, having lived there for 18 years full time and 22 years on and off counting college, and there's just even in an example, going beyond just New York City and going to even a smaller town, there's all these people's different lives.

And I think that kind of goes back to what you were saying about how individually, I think it could be anxiety inducing, but it could also be relieving in a sense to know that you individually cannot necessarily make an incredibly large impact on the world because of just the sheer scope of the number of people that are existing and have existed before you. But it's also kind of relieving in a sense, the knowing that, hey, the burden of the world's problems are not just on your shoulders. And I think I don't want to conflate this necessarily with just saying, so don't worry about anything and don't try to make anything better or do anything about it. But just realizing that you're not solely responsible for all of the problems. You can only control what you can control, maybe some sort of stoic view of it, of you can only control very tangible things in your life, but those things can have real impacts on the people around you. So I don't have children, but if you have a child, you can make a very tangible impact on that kid's life. Or if you have family members and close friends, you can make tangible impacts on those lives for good and for bad. So thinking about that in that sense, I think is relieving in a way because it allows us to really focus on what we can actually change, what we can actually have an impact on, and without feeling the burden of necessarily trying to fix all the world's problems at once.

Juliette Sellgren (15:07)

Well, what's so weird is why should that thought be so relieving? I try to explain that realizing that it's not your problem or trying to explain to older people in the movement or just adults or people that I grew up around that us fixing the problems, again, whatever that's supposed to mean is not a narrative that is conducive to actually fixing any problems for whatever reason. It's really hard to communicate that. But I think kind of the idea that you were saying of how do you do it, the method is really important and understanding that it has to be through you, through the individual to the other individuals to actually get anywhere. I mean even just in terms of learning, how are you supposed to learn, how you can make change, how you can impact others eventually at a point if you want to make societal change or a change on the frontier of knowledge or something, you can't do that if you've never experimented on a smaller scale.

Justin Callais (16:19)

Marginal. Exactly. You're not going to immediately be able to solve the world. Yes, marginal, marginal thinking, right? You cannot solve the world's problems without solving very concrete individual problems before. If you think about just anyone who, if we think of the people in history who have made the largest changes and have stand out in the history books of people like, oh, they made monumental changes in the world. If you think of your favorite entrepreneur, your favorite political leader, your favorite or at least favorite political leader or your favorite philanthropists, or you think of your favorite religious leader, whoever that is, they had to start somewhere.

Everyone had to start. You don't just all of a sudden you're not all of a sudden become 18, and now you have the freedom to do all these different things, and then you instantly just change the world immediately. You have to start somewhere. And if you're not going to first focus on what can get you to those steps in the first place, you're not going to actually make the impact that we all want to make an impact. We all want to do something that leaves the world in a better place than what we left it. But you're not going to do that without first being able to concretely focus on the things you can control first and then work towards that. And this isn't to say, I think as generations, generations typically make the world a better place as a whole, but generations are millennials or Gen Z or Gen Xers, whatever group you want to say. As a group, we make impacts and we have concrete evidence of what those impacts can look like in the world, but it's still just a collection of individuals. And if those individuals need to first focus on what they can control first, and then that's where you can see those impacts around first, because that's all culture is, right? Culture is just the collectively or broadly the collective norms of a group at a given time.

Juliette Sellgren 

Let's make it economics. 

Justin Callais (18:22)

Yeah, it's aggregate of all of these different individuals that have some sort of overarching belief system. But again, those things cannot happen unless individuals are first focusing on what they can control.

Juliette Sellgren (18:39)

I love this. It also, I mean there's a reason why I don't even want to say productivity books, not really the productivity genre, but the how do you be a great person and a great leader and a great whatever change maker. There's a reason why all of that, I don't want to call it literature, all of those pop books that talk about that sort of thing, focus on the personal lives of great people because that's where it starts. You're exactly right. So then how about you? You're super productive. I told you this before, you write about all sorts of things, and so it's kind of difficult to even just pin you down in terms of what your mission is, how you're going to accomplish change and impact or anything. But how did you get there and how did you land on this?

Justin Callais (19:36)

No, that's a really great question, and it's something I ask myself quite often. It's like, how did this end up happening? So I think about just to start to give maybe some sort of timeline perspective of, well, I was an undergrad and I picked the best major that you could pick economics and I really had no idea what I wanted to do. I just kind had no clue what I wanted to do. In all honesty, I picked Loyola New Orleans for undergrad, not because they had great economists there. I didn't really know anything about economics. I picked it because it was in New Orleans, and New Orleans is a great city to go to college, and it's a great place to live. So much so that I live here again now. So I really just picked it just to go there. And I was like, well, what do I want to do? And I was like, oh, something business. So lemme just go to the college of business and start there. And I started, took my intro at econ class and we started talking about just different topics and it just all kind of clicked. And I think that's one thing that at least with econ specifically, and I guess I'm assuming for a lot of other majors or fields, is that when it just clicks know when that's what you're called to do and when, that's what interests, you can't even really explain it.

There wasn't like, oh, I'm going to pick economics so I could become an econ professor so that I could do X, Y, Z. It was just fit. And then towards junior, senior year, I was kind of just thinking about what do I want to actually do now that I have this major, what do I want to do? And I was thinking, and I'm like, well, what my professors do seem pretty cool. Let me just talk to them. So I just asked a few of my great econ professors that I had at Loyola. I'm like, how did you get to this point? How did you get to this point? And again, I think this actually weirdly ties back to what we talked about before is that maybe those specific econ professors didn't think they might've had the same ideas of like, oh, I want to change the world.

I want to do this stuff. But really where that impact came from is at an individual level first. If they don't realize it now, they might not realize it. Maybe if they listen to this podcast, they'll realize it. But they had a major impact on my life and they had a major impact on my career trajectory because I just asked them, how did you do? What got you to this point and how did you do it? And I just kind of followed those steps, went to grad school and basically I just wanted to be an econ teacher. I just wanted to teach economics. And I knew, well, if I want to do that with any sort of job security, I need to have a PhD. So I did that. And then I'm in this program at Texas Tech affiliated with the Free Market Institute, and I really found interest in research because I feel like oftentimes in academia this, we think about this dichotomy of like, oh, well, you're the teacher. You do research. Or maybe, oh, I mainly do research, but I have to teach on the side. I really think..

Juliette Sellgren (22:37)

There's always like, sorry, I do have to do this other half of thing. It's like you get to do both.

Justin Callais (22:45)

Yeah, exactly. No, exactly right. You get to do both. And I truly think they are complements, not substitutes. I think thinking about research and thinking about how to answer certain questions made me a better teacher because it helped me part of college, part of what the college experience should be is a knowledge creation. You learn things about the world and you have certain questions about the world and you want to solve them, and you just want to solve those issues and you want to find out what the actual answer is. And for me, how I ended up kind of, I'm going to skip a few steps. I could probably talk about this for two hours, but how I came down to what I wanted to research now was when I started thinking about the question, okay, why are some places rich and others poor? And I think Doug North might've said this, if not, it was definitely someone in this sort of field, but I believe it was Doug North who said, once you start thinking about that question, it's almost impossible to think about. Any other question once you think about, yeah, wait, and you can think about this across countries, you can think about this across states. Why is Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia so much poorer than Texas and Florida, even though, or why is West Virginia poorer than Virginia? Even though they're basically, I mean…

Juliette Sellgren 

We're not the same.

Justin Callais 

Other than the fact of a border. They're kind of very similar, right?

Juliette Sellgren 

Yeah.

Justin Callais (24:19)

I mean they're similar in terms of geography and in every other way that is just like if we didn't put a line, what makes them different is the institutions and the rules. And because we put a line, and Virginia has jurisdiction over this and West Virginia has jurisdiction over this, you get different outcomes.

Juliette Sellgren 

And we even have kind of the same origin story. It used to be one state actually, or one region. I don't even know if it was as a state, one state, but yeah,

Justin Callais (24:48)

But they're right next to each other. The county right next to on the border of West Virginia and Virginia, for all intents and purposes are roughly the same except for the fact that one is in West Virginia, one's in Virginia, and they live under different rules and institutions. I mean, the most obvious example of this here internationally is North and South Korea. It was just Korea. It was Korea. Then they split up and one decided to be a authoritarian communistic hellhole, and one decided to be more of a capitalistic modern society before they were the same people. They just put an imaginary line right in the middle, and they have different rules and they live by those rules. And you see the vast difference in outcomes. So those questions just started. It was impossible, like I said, to think about anything else. So just the entire research part of that just wanted to be what explains this different levels of productivity and different levels of flourishing.

And that's kind of where it got into thinking about mobility, not just how are area certain better off than others, but also what are some of the things that determine how people cannot just become better off in terms of wealth, happiness, life satisfaction, health outcomes, et cetera. But also what makes someone being able to live the life that they want to live and what sort of institutions or what sort of rules or what sort of culture is in place that allows people to improve. And actually, it's not just like, alright, you're born because you think about it historically, for many people, you're born in this class and you were staying in this class forever, and there's no way to get out of it. You weren't born to nobility, so your life is going to be a peasant, and that just is how it is. So that's when I really started thinking about these sort of mobility questions.

And to kind of take it back a little bit, I was thinking about, for example, my grandfather who was born to parents who didn't really speak English, we were born in, they were raised in very south east Louisiana, didn't speak English. And he was like, well, how can I improve my situation? And one of those ways is going to college. But he had a lot of siblings who didn't have, or he had two older siblings who were already in college. So he had to wait, basically he had to work for a year or two to actually get his way to college, and then actually was able to then have an actual successful life and wanted to focus on individually, how can I make myself better? And then in that implicitly or explicitly discovered the market process, which is I can only make my life better by providing value to everyone else.

And that's kind where I really got into this mobility and entrepreneurship link. I know this is kind of maybe a long-winded way of saying this, but it's just a lot of different personal experiences like seeing my grandfather, seeing going into academia and trying to see what I wanted to do. And then the types of questions that I wanted to answer were just much like how you mentioned earlier, but my research and what I work on is kind of all over the place, and it's very kind of all-rounded, but it's at the core question of how are people able to flourish and what rules allow for people to flourish in a society.

Juliette Sellgren (28:23)

I think that was perfect because it is a very good example, which you can only really see if we get into the details you did. Just how the individual personal experiences actually do teach you how not only change is made, but how to even think about the world without thinking about the example of your grandfather. You could not have been clued into certain elements of how growth and mobility work, and that's what you do on the grander scale is talk about how that works. And so even those minor examples and anecdotes along the way are really, I mean, they go back to the first question. So let's talk about mobility. Something that I, so you've kind of made the case for why mobility is important to us, but I've always kind of struggled with this conceptually, if we care about mobility, what type of mobility do we care about? What does it even mean? I think economists say that, and then other people are like, I can walk. I'm not disabled, fingers crossed. And so what do we mean when we say that? And is there a point where that becomes irrelevant? Are there people that matters more for, does it matter more in certain parts of the world or the United States that mobility exists, right? Is it more effective as an institution? It's not really an institution, it's kind of a metric, but it's an important characteristic. Where is it more important and where is it less important or is it equally important all around?

Justin Callais (30:17)

Yeah, so I guess if I had to, I guess the first thing I'll say is I think it is probably most important for the people that need it the most. And what I mean by that is mobility is most important for the people who are the most economically or politically disadvantaged in the world, in the country, in the state, in the locality, whatever degree you want, whatever sort of area you want to look at, it matters most because if you are born to a billionaire, you're pretty happy in your state. You're probably don't want to be too, you might want to be mobile in terms of being able to do other things. You might want to be able to live your life in certain other ways, but it's really crucially important for the poorest among us. And I think that's kind of at least what got me super passionate about this topic, which is just the idea that, well, you don't want to be born if you're born in a situation.

You don't want that to be just the determining factor for what happens the rest of your life. You want to live, if you want to think about it in a specific context, mobility is the American dream. It is, at least in my view, it is the American dream. It is the way in which you can, I hate the term, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. That's not exactly where I want to go with this. But the idea that you can or if allowed, you should have the ability to make your life what you want it to be. And I think this is important for income and people, especially economists, we like to think about this in terms of income, mobility of what your parents' income is not determinant of your income. In the ideal world, that relationship should be pretty low in an ideal world, because that would imply that if it's a very strong relationship, that would imply that your parents' income is almost a perfect predictor of your income.

That's not that great of an outcome to be in. What I think matters more here in a broader context, and this is where this sort of thinking has evolved, at least for me, is well, mobility means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So I like to think of it more in terms of social mobility, which is, okay, well, you don't just necessarily want to make more money than your parents. That means you can do more things, provide for your children in a better way, go on more vacations, all these sort of things. We also just get to live the life that you want to live if you want. Some mobility can mean different things for different people. For some it might mean I want to make the most amount of money as possible for something that might mean I want to have a good stable job.

I'm willing to not take on the risks necessarily that go along with maybe starting a new startup or a new venture or something like that. But that also allows for you to, you can make those choices. It's basically the freedom to make the choices that you see to make your life better. So that is, I want to have a stable income with a spouse and a few children, and I provide for them in a way that is good and I provide for them, and I am a present parent in their lives. That is mobility to me. You being able to live the life that you want to live in a way that you see as productive, because it kind of goes back to that original point of control. What you can control, what is the life that you, knowing how each individual or how an individual views their sort of ideal, it matters a lot to figure out how can you live that life that you want to live.

And to me, that's just mobility, just being able to live the life that you want to live no matter what that might mean. I mean, for example, to tie back into something that we've talked about a lot at the Bridge Institute is we do these surveys of American Dream surveys every single year, and they have, even before I was there, they've done it for a few years, and they ask people, what does the American dream mean to you? And I think in part because the US is already, despite what everyone thinks, a very rich developed strong institutions for the most part country. There's obviously some concerns we might want to get into later about things going on in the us, but we can get into those later to where for most people, what the American dream means to them is not just, oh, I want to make a lot of money.

It means I want to live a more fulfilled life. It goes back to those hierarchy of needs of like, well, a middle income person in the US can live a pretty good life, especially relative to the US 20 years ago, 50 years ago, a hundred years ago, 200 years ago. But also relative to most other countries in the entire world, a middle income person in the US can live a very good life. So now that you have those needs met, what else can matter? And I think that goes back to again, that first question that you asked of why is it that we, in my generation, your generation and younger and maybe even some generations older, why are we having these burdens of figuring out what's going on in the world and trying to solve all these problems? I think in part because for the most part, we all live pretty good lives.

If you were a child born in the US in 1800, well, you weren't really worried too much about the rest of the world. You were trying to make sure that you as a family unit survived and lived. Now those needs are met, and we no longer have to worry about those specific things. For the most part, now we can worry about all these other things. So I think for mobility, it really comes back to the idea that you just want to be able to have the life that you feel the most fulfilled in. So it's kind of this somewhat abstract idea, at least to me, because people are individuals and people have different views. So I think that's where that kind of freedom and mobility sort of lapse there or interacts there is thinking about how people can live the life that they want to live and how that life can get better. And to me, that's what mobility is.

Juliette Sellgren (36:50)

It seems like you have such a colorful understanding of this concept and these concepts more generally that I think most economists maybe not, then they have, but then they express and maybe they measure. So then when you go about measuring it, you kind of touched on some of these problems where income mobility we think is great because a money is universal, is the one thing that's super duper measurable across all people. But also what it means to economists is that we have choice that people can choose different sorts of things that are more likely to based on their preferences and what it means to actually fulfill themselves, at least in whatever way you can with income, it means that you're more likely to be able to do that and to figure that out. But then depending on your preferences for money and fulfillment and all of this stuff, and once you do have fulfillment, how do you go about measuring mobility if you have already dealt with the income bit, but you have to deal with this other thing of, well, that's not the whole story, or especially in a place so prosperous, that's not the whole story.

Because I guess the marginal return to increased income mobility once you're already absolutely pretty freaking prosperous is less than for people who do not have anything where that really just makes a huge difference. It means you're well fed and now it's like, oh, I get to buy another bow. Yay. I dunno, that was a really dumb example. But how do you measure this fulfillment bit and how do you know the counterfactual of this person's life would've looked this way otherwise if they weren't fulfilled or would look this way if they were fulfilled and figuring that out. Do you account for that at all when you kind of look at and measure these things and how would you even go about doing that?

Justin Callais (39:04)

Yeah, no, that's a super interesting question. Yeah. In part because I view it as so, and I think to be fair to a lot of economists in this field, one of the reasons that people look at income mobility is, like you said, it's measurable. It's something we could actually measure.

And we know just from, and I'll give myself a not so humble plug of my first post in my Substack debunking, you talked about why economic growth is underrated and why it's not appreciated as much as I think it should be. Especially now you've seen a lot of people say, oh, well growth is good and all this, but it comes at these societal cost of we are now just purely economic agents who just want to make as much money as possible, but economic growth is good because economic growth is very well correlated with all these other things we care about. So you say like, oh, well, a lot of people say like, oh, economic growth matters a lot, but what really matters is happiness or life satisfaction or life expectancy or health outcomes. Luckily, economic growth is correlated with all those things. And I think causally related to all these things as well, that economic growth is the solution to all of these problems.

If you think about it from an economic standpoint, more growth means that we have more choices, which means we have more ability to find new solutions that we did before. So sure, economic growth might also be good to get a second boat or even a first boat, the example you gave. But it's also good because, okay, well now we have higher income, so we can now take care of those sort of other needs. If you look on, we're both in a younger generation, if you're scrolling on Instagram and you come across these ads, a lot of these ads are for products that people 30 years ago might've said like, what is this? Oh, it's this cool water floss pick. Okay, what does that need? That's kind of cool, but what does it do? Well, it can provide a lot of tangible benefits to having your teeth more cleaned in a way that you would need to go to the dentist before to actually get that sort of experience. I know that's a very specific example, but it's at least it's the last ad I remember seeing on Instagram.

Juliette Sellgren (41:13)

Well then you're not dying of whatever tooth stuff…

Justin Callais 

And disease. Yeah.

Juliette Sellgren (41:20)

If you have plaque in your teeth for a long time, it can get into your bloodstream and give you an infection that used to kill a lot of people. And if you keep your teeth, which we can do now, we keep them, we don't lose them or replacements.

Justin Callais (41:40)

And if you do lose them, we now have the innovation and prosperity to give you dentures and all these other things that provide that mean you're not just going to have to drink smoothies for the rest of your life. So yeah. So to go back to your mobility question of how do we measure it beyond just the sort of concept, I think that's the difficult part. And in all honesty, something I haven't fully figured out, but at least at Archbridge we've tried doing, for example, a few years ago and later this year we'll come out with our second edition of the social mobility of the 50 states and where we take this sort of as best we can, this holistic viewpoint of what matters for mobility. So we look at things like entrepreneurship and economic growth, understanding that entrepreneurship is not just good for the entrepreneur, but it's good for the employees that they hire because if employees are working at a firm and that specific firm, because that's their best choice given all those other possible constraints. So whether that gives them the best life satisfaction or the highest income or the best work-life balance to where they can work and work, make a good living, but still be home and spend time with their family or friends. So all those factors that go into this.

So that could be the tax structure of a state, the regulatory environment of a state or just the dynamic nature of that business environment in the state, but also look at institutions and rule of law, which is how do judicial systems matter? So we have this idea in the US of equal access to justice, but that's not really actually the case across states. That's a huge difference amongst them. And being from Louisiana, that is where we actually rank the lowest or we actually rank the lowest overall. But in that specific area is where we kind of stand out. And also the state predatory action. So how states specifically get in the way of your life, how they more proactively get in the way of you living a fulfilled life, but also education and skills development and parental engagement and stability, all these aspects that individually have an impact, but in this kind of aggregate sense, all have a piece of the puzzle that makes up a good fulfilled mobile life, or at least the environment in that state to live a good fulfilled life.

And then finally, social capital, right? Communities matter. So if we live in this world where we're increasingly living in this world, in the US where so many of those societal issues are becoming this top down, one solution solves all sort of thing, or at least one policy, this one size fits all policy, but social capital and community matters like we talked about earlier, community matters. And having those close connections with people near us, having those close connections to the community, your family, your friends, your children, your spouse, all these things matter. So no, I don't think there's one perfect way to measure this kind of going beyond something like income, but I do think that at least if I could be a little maybe not so humble, I think that our index does a good job of doing is trying to get this kind of holistic, well-rounded view of what does a mobile life mean and what does it look like in the US?

Juliette Sellgren (45:14)

I'm really trying not to sneeze right now. I did it. You kind of talked about the things that go into making a mobile life or they can be destructive to having a mobile and prosperous life that has people flourishing. But is there an example, I guess mean, you mentioned Louisiana as being one of the worst, but what is the best place to live for this?

Justin Callais (45:43)

So at least according to our index, Utah seems to be doing really well and they rank really highly. And I think in part it is a lot of the kind of societal cultural things about Utah that make them a well-rounded community. But there's also tangible policies as well that Utah is doing and has done and has improved upon. For example, they're the only state in the country that has a one door policy to welfare. And what that basically means is that if you are in a situation where you need welfare benefits, well, if we believe that transactions costs matter, and they do that, Utah makes it as easy as possible for someone to actually receive those benefits. So they don't have to go through, oh, you have to fill out this form and this form, and you go to this office to get your housing and you go to this office to get your food stamps and you go to this house to get education assistance and you to go to this building to insert any other benefit that you might need disabilities or whatever else you might need.

Utah has a policy where you can go to any place and you go to any of those government assistance offices and get all of your benefits from that one place versus having to spend all this time filling out the right forms and going to the right place and going to all these different places. If you are someone who needs benefits in society, but you also are trying to get out of that situation, well, if you have to spend all this time going to these different places to get all these different solutions, that's all big, this large opportunity cost and large transactions cost of going to those places.

Juliette Sellgren 

And it's the only state, the only state of death..

Justin Callais (47:30)

It's the only state, and it was grandfathered in. So they ran it before. And then when the federal government started doing more of these sorts of policies at a federal level, they grandfathered Utah in. So now there's actually interestingly, some legislation that states are trying to pass to join Utah in this movement. Louisiana actually being one of them, Louisiana, Georgia, and there's a few other states, but I'm blanking on the other ones. I believe maybe Texas that's trying to do this as well and just basically get, they want to do it, but they just need to get approval from the federal government to actually do it.

Juliette Sellgren (48:07)

So talking about the case of Louisiana for a minute, what is it that makes it rank so low compared to other places? And what do you think, just taking the example of this policy, how much of a tangible benefit would it make in terms of its ranking and people's lives? I mean, is that one of the main problem areas in Louisiana, or is it something else?

Justin Callais (48:34)

Well, if you're 50th, which Louisiana is that probably, or it doesn't mean you have a lot of things you can work on. So I mean, Louisiana for being in the Gulf South has one of, if not the highest tax burdens of any of the states. They also have some of the strictest regulations on some specific industries that matter to Louisiana despite being known for its food and alcohol and culture. They have some of the strictest regulations on food and alcohol of these specifically in the Gulf South states. And they're also just notoriously corrupt. I mean, Louisiana is a notoriously historically corrupt state that obviously corruption at its core benefits the politically privileged at the expense of everyone else. But also I think also just a very tangible benefit is what we were just talking about, that one door policy.

If you are in a situation where you are, you need all these benefits just to make a living just to survive, but you also want to get out of that, right? So you can spend all this time getting all these different benefits and that makes your life better. So it's worthwhile doing, but also means if you actually want to get out of that situation, it's going to be very hard to do because now you have to spend hours every month doing all these different forms and going into these different buildings and waiting in these different lines. Well, you're giving up time. You could be either learning a skill that can help you improve and get out of that welfare dependency. And it also means you have to, that's time that you could have just spent working as well. So I mean, you're almost kind of in this vicious cycle of like, well, I need to spend all this time getting all these benefits to survive, but by doing so, it's making it increasingly harder for me to actually get out of those situations. This is where something like these one door policy would matter a lot, or just licensing, just getting rid of a lot of unnecessary licensing. Louisiana has the highest number of occupational licenses that are required for low income jobs. They used to have one that was, they were the only state in the country that had a license to become a florist.

Juliette Sellgren

What the heck?

Justin Callais (50:53)

Yes, they recently got rid of it, luckily, but they were only state that required this. And what does that mean? Well, it means that you need to spend time and training and money to do this, but if you are in a low income situation, it's even harder for you to actually get those licenses. You have to give up the time that you need to work or wait in these lines to get these benefits. So you're now in this vicious cycle of, well, you don't have the time or money to actually do this. So if you just get rid of the licenses, you can do this much more easily and cheaply.

Juliette Sellgren (51:31)

Yeah. Wait, okay, so I might be wrong about this fact, but isn't Mississippi the poorest state?

Justin Callais 

I believe Mississippi is the poorest state. Yes, that sounds correct. Yeah,

Juliette Sellgren (51:43)

I mean, that makes me think Mississippi probably wouldn't rank super highly, but it's still higher up in the rankings in Louisiana. Yeah,

That seems kind of odd. I mean, maybe the kind of extractive institutions help the politically well off maybe explains that, but how does that fact factor into our understanding of what this means?

Justin Callais (52:10)

Well, I don't want to take too much out of just saying that, oh, Louisiana scores worse in Mississippi, so Louisiana's worse off the Mississippi just because just by the nature of making these sort of indexes, you kind of have to give these numbers and scores to be scores, I believe 49th or 48th. So I mean, they're not doing great in this fact either. But no, I think that there's are things obviously that differ within the states that Mississippi is doing better than Louisiana. This is particularly in respect to licensing and regulation, they have way fewer business regulations than Louisiana. So a lot of people now, Louisiana has been one of, I believe, the only Gulf South state that has negative migration rates. More people are leaving the state than moving in. And the one that really made me concerned was that more people from Louisiana moved to Mississippi than people from Mississippi moved to Louisiana. And that was, I love Mississippi and love the people of Mississippi. But that was kind of one where I got really concerned, where I was like, oh, wow, we're even losing to Mississippi. We got to fix something. This is not great.

Juliette Sellgren (53:20)

So then I guess taking the rankings as a relative thing, which they are, what can the states on the bottom half, bottom three fourths bottom, however much, or even just across the board, what could be done to move up in terms of rankings and what could every single state, regardless of ranking do that would improve mobility?

Justin Callais (53:49)

Yeah, so I think that's a very great question. I think in part even states that score great. For example, some of our top five states are like Utah, Minnesota, the Dakotas, they all have things they could work on too, right? No one's getting one's rank number one of everybody else. Yeah. So I mean, for example, in the case of Utah, they're solely getting better at, but still had a very poor scores on education freedom and allowing for things like school choice or housing regulations. They're getting better at this, but there was still something that at least at the time, they were scoring pretty poorly on. So being able to do these different, in the case of Minnesota, right, they are very high tax state and high regulation state, but they scored well on some of the other measures that made their rankings look good. I think the most broad case I could give for the low ranking states would be that they really need to solve business dynamism. I think there's this, people have argued for a while that there's this general trend in the US that business dynamism is going down, which is true to an extent, but is especially true in specific states.

So dynamic environments allow for more business churn, business opportunities, innovation. And that's at the end of the day, innovation is what drives long-term growth, innovation and technological advancements. And if you're in a state that isn't prioritizing that in a way that basically just means allowing people to do these activities, you're going to keep falling behind. And at the end of the day, education matters a lot. For example, Louisiana just passed, or education matters a lot, but also just overall ability to live a reasonably well life in those areas. So Louisiana just dropped its income, income tax rate a little bit, which is great, but whenever you look at it, there's still a lot of legal issues going on in the state that are holding us back and has made something like insurance incredibly expensive in Louisiana relative to other states. So it's like, okay, well if you saved three grand on income tax from moving to Louisiana from let's say Mississippi, but you then have to pay $6,000 more in insurance because of a lot of the lack of tort reform that we've had in Louisiana, well, no one's going to move here.

If you're spending six grand more, but saving three grand on taxes, that movement's not going to happen. So there are a lot of tangible things that a lot of these states need to do in terms of taxes, regulation, education, policies, and just from a community level, social capital matters a lot. It's one of the best forms of not government aspects that matter most to mobility and as well as having parental engagement and instability. A lot of these Gulf South states score really poorly on this, which is why a lot of the ranking score low. I think in part of that is due to welfare policies that we disincentivize marriage, we disincentivize family stability because you make it incredibly expensive for people to live or to be married and be in a marriage. I don't know if Mike Munger said this here, but I know he said it in this podcast, brother know, he said it before, is that government's like a bad pimp, that you make it impossible to actually leave the situation because you disincentivize the things that allow you to move out of that situation and move out of the need for benefits.

And that's, in part, it's a marriage penalty. You're people to be together and live a more stable engaged life with your,

Juliette Sellgren (57:56)

And we can at least identify and we're getting closer to identifying through the work that you're doing and other folks are doing exactly what needs to happen in order to get us there. And if community and culture are really important, that's great, because one of the things that we actually can actively be a part of, which I feel like is inspiring, I'm kind of excited now about this.

Justin Callais (58:22)

Exactly. I try to be an optimist and I believe, I think the last thing I'll say on this is there's a lot of reasons to be skeptical and be worried about the state of the world and the state of the US. But even all things considered right, things are still pretty good.

And I think the optimistic view is things still. We still live good lives here, and we still live good lives around a lot of the world, and even in places that do not necessarily live a good life relative to us or other rich country standards for most places, we're much better off now than we are previously. So I'm an optimist about the future, in part because I think there's so many things we could point to say, this is bad, this is wrong. We shouldn't do this, shouldn't do that. But things are still pretty good. So just imagine how great they can be when we do remove these certain barriers.

Juliette Sellgren 

Yeah, this has been great. I'm excited to get going on whatever this implies for my life,

Justin Callais 

The American dream or the mobility of Juliette. 

Juliette Sellgren (59:36)

Yes. I have one last question for you, and that is, what is one thing that you believed at one time in your life that you later changed your position on and why?

Justin Callais (59:46)

This is one of my favorite questions. I grew up in South Louisiana, so I grew up kind of just not thinking too much about politics, but I definitely define myself as a pretty strong, hardcore conservative or Republican because when I think about some of the biggest leaders in the Republican space, at least growing up, it were people, was people like Reagan or Lincoln who were drivers of talking about freedom and talking about the tangible benefits of freedom. And then I got to high school and we had to take, I'm in civics and we had to take this political guess political leaning test, and I was answering the questions how I thought at least what my idea of a freedom loving conservative meant. And I actually scored one of the least conservative people in the class, and I was thinking about it. I'm like, wait, how is that possible?

And I was looking at the questions. I went back to look over the questions and I was like, oh, I'm not a conservative. I'm a classical liberal, or I'm a libertarian, or whatever term you want to use to call it. Because I saw things like, I was like, well, if we care about freedom, that means people should be able to marry who they want, and you should be able to reasonably consume the things that you want. And you should have things like free trade, and you should have things like, oh, well, why should marijuana be illegal if there's not these very drastic or relative to alcohol? Alcohol has a much higher overdose use rate in terms of both its ability if you're driving drunk or something. And so it's all these things that I thought meant about were something that someone who loved freedom cared about, but it was just I was using the wrong term all along. So it wasn't necessarily that I changed my viewpoints on those topics until I really, or I guess I did change my viewpoints on the topics once. I really thought about fundamentally what it means to love freedom and love prosperity.

Juliette Sellgren 

Once again, I'd like to thank my guests for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to the Great Antidote Podcast. It 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.