Engineering to political economy w/ Professor Khalid Kadir

Chapter 1: Introduction

Mike: I'm very excited to welcome you all to the inaugural episode of the Misaligned Markets podcast. This is my first interview with a very special guest. I want to introduce you to my very first professor uh in political economy, Khalid Kadir. Lots of first going on here. So back in 2011 is when I joined UC Berkeley's political economy department. And um this was my first first class in the uh the program, or one of my first classes, I should say. So Khalid is a continuing lecturer at UC Berkeley, teaching courses in global property and practice, political economy, and civil and environmental engineering. He has a BSE in mechanical engineering from University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MSE and PhD in civil and environmental engineering from UC Berkeley. So Khalid's research and work sits at the intersection of engineering and the politics of international development and poverty. Khalid was awarded the prestigious Constellation Prize for engineering education in 2020, the American Cultures Teaching Award in 2019, and in 2017, UC Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award, the campus's most prestigious honor for teaching. Just to set the stage here, this interview is going to be a two-parter. So the first episode is going to go into Khalid's background and some of his areas of interest and his intriguing story going from engineering into the domain of political economy more broadly. And then the second episode is going to be more about uh current events and uh the particular types of insights that a political economy background can give you on those contemporary issues. So without further ado, welcome Khalid Kadir to the Misaligned Markets podcast.

Chapter 2: Journey from engineering to political economy
Mike: I'm really interested in talking to you because, you know, your background in both engineering and political economy politics expertise, right? You're looking at the way in which civil society meets engineering, right? And that's such an important concept because there's obviously the the mechanical and technical expertise of being an engineer, but in the real world, you know, how is it that engineering projects and processes are actually implemented, right? There's a whole other layer uh involved in that process. So I wanted to get a sense from you, you know, what is your journey? How did you kind of end up taking on those uh uh um kind of like uh questions in your work as an engineer? And then what ultimately made you move into um political comedy, say, over say sociology or economics?

Khalid Kadir: Yeah, I think uh appreciate that perspective. It's it's I'll start by saying that the journey was not one that I planned. It's not like I set out, I knew where I was going, and I executed a plan to get there. Which is how I think a lot of people try to plan their lives.MikeI think most people realize that it's too many factors in order for you to even make that work out, right?Khalid KadirAnd it gets in the way of the potential for growing and learning something new that changes where you want to go. If you're too focused on that singular end goal, you might get there and not not be the thing you wanted.

Mike: Discovery is a journey.

Khalid Kadir: Yeah, totally, totally. So, so I I dove into engineering and you know buried myself in the technical stuff and pursued that for a while. And then once I entered into the space of doing a PhD, and maybe even a step before that, I got in engineering because I just wanted to do useful good things in the world, right? Like in a very vague, abstract sense. Um, and as I continued down the road towards my PhD, I was studying the sort of science and engineering of wastewater treatment, thinking about it particularly in applications to developing countries. Uh, I was looking at natural treatment systems, ponds, and wetlands that are technically very good, but not used as much as I would have expected. That there's a huge problem of untreated wastewater, contaminating drinking water, people getting sick. Uh, and there's really for over a hundred years, there's we there's no reason for that. Like we know how to clean drinking water, it's not complicated at all. We knew it you know before we had the internet, right? So uh, and yet it's not happening. And so that led me to sort of wondering like, why isn't why is this the case? Like, why is it that this very you know useful tool is not that people have actually known about for a long time, isn't being used? And why am I like Mickey Mousing with it trying to make it better when the basic idea has always been there and it works? That initially led me to economics because I assumed it was a money issue, right? Uh and economics isn't that far from engineering, it's it's all about numbers, right, and models and and whatnot. And uh so I didn't find the coursework challenging, but I found It's totally irrelevant. It wasn't helping me answer any of the questions. Um, and then the next step I took was into taking development studies classes and looking at the history of international development in a critical frame. And it was there that some light bulbs really went off. And it forced me to think about political economy, more or less. And it took a while to make sense of that. It started with thinking about the politics of development on the backbone of imperialism and colonialism and whatnot, but this very quickly led to the sort of promotion of capitalism all over the world. And and in the time I was studying, this is like the early to mid uh maybe around 2005, let's say, there was, you know, heavy push for market-based methods for doing anything. And public-private partnerships in the drinking water sector were a sort of a real hot item at the time and contentious. Uh, and so I was reading papers people were writing about the sort of failures of public-private partnerships to bring people drinking water and how, you know, poor people got cut off because it wasn't profitable to bring them drinking water. And it made me think about the mechanisms through which people get things, which is kind of a political economy question, right? Like, how is it that people get the things they get? What are the mechanisms that who gets what and how? So that's how I went down that road. How I specifically ended up in political economy instead of sociology or geography. I think geography would have been the natural jump for me in many ways. Um, I think part of it is my first classes in this space were taught in the Department of City Planning,which is adifferent beast altogether, right? And and uh methodologically heterodox, a lot of different possibilities there. So I didn't get tied into a methodological approach or uh or a historical canon or a sorry theoretical canon, so to speak. I mean, I learned about the the theoretical canon of cities and urbanization, but that didn't speak to everything that was not a city. So that was a flag that I saw. But I think it it started there. I took some geography classes, but within the framework of development studies, so I think it was really a development studies approach that I took, which isn't a department, it's a field, but it's not really a department, right? Uh and so I think I was like open in that way. Uh interestingly, it wasn't until I started seriously diving into political economy as an intellectual project that I came to understand where sociology fit. Um, and you know, it also is probably in part, perhaps in large part, related to the specific school. I studied here at Berkeley. And the sociology department at Berkeley has a specific approach to political economy, right? Different schools have different flavors, and so I came upon that much later thinking about the institutionalists and whatnot that are here.

Chapter 3: Berkeley's approach to political economy and positivism
Mike: Yeah, this is this is so great. There's so many threads here. I mean, the first thing I was gonna point out is this is very Berkeley specific. I, in my own journey to political economy, was a bit of an accident too. I I wanted to do public health, and a lot of that I realized that I was interested in was distribution of health, and and then that kind of let me going upstream as it were, going further up and up and up. Eventually I wanted to do economics. The department was impacted, so I kind of ended up political economy by accident. It was sort of like a happy accident, though. And then at Cal, you know, at least for undergraduate political economy, there's a lot of um flexibility in choosing your courses. So there is a very not just interdisciplinary, but also kind of a very um flexible, open-ended approach to political economy, kind of a build-your-own curriculum kind of approach. And I think, you know, obviously as a as a like a 19, 20 year old is a bit hard to do, but you know, I lucked out. Um, some of my favorite professors, I think, have been fundamental in in shaping my my um my approach to to things, and like I really appreciate that. I I I do see that like even looking at other schools, political comedy is not a very common field, and you do get a lot of uh methodological rigidness when you kind of drill into some specific sub-niche, right? So in in an ideal world, maybe you know, uh if someone were to do a liberal arts curriculum or um a humanities kind of approach to studying these issues, maybe they start with political economy as their general education and then drill into some specific methodology.

Khalid Kadir: And I think there's even tension here around that. I would say that, you know, because these different scholars have their homes in different departments, they have their own methodological norms that they and the the tension I feel that is strongest is between the need to understand everything in a positivist frame as opposed to opening the doors to other frames. I think that's a tension.

Mike: Totally that's like a that's like a foundational approach to most Western inquiries, so I don't really know if you can escape-

Khalid Kadir: Totally, totally, totally. Although I will say that, you know, if you're living in anthropology, you'll have an easier time. Opening the door to other non-quantitative approaches. But I think that, you know, given that a heavy weight of political economy at Berkeley is in the political science frame, and the political science department in Berkeley is pretty pretty positivist. There's not a lot of sort of philosophers left over there. So I think that shapes it. However, we live in that tension, which I appreciate. I think we have to live in that tension. Rather than to jump on one side or the other side, to live at the intersection of that, I think is where there's a lot of generative work that happens. And it it gets away from the sloppy everything over there is bad and everything over here is good, which happens too much.

Chapter 4: Economics' methodological rigidity and reform movements
Mike: Yeah, I think of it as like lens adoption, right? So you've got these lenses. I think they all prevent or they all present a particular slice of the world, and it's only through aggregating them you kind of get a clearer picture, right? So um, but I I do completely agree. I mean, part of my frustration with um economics as like a field is like it is very methodologically kind of uh inert and kind of like uh rigid, built on models from like you know, the 1800s, right? Like the core supply-demand model is basically the while rating auction, right? Okay, and you know, like there's there's a lot of you know economics has kind of evolved beyond that uh in the in in into the adoption of other fields like kind of metrics, empirical, macro. Sure. Right, but even you know, within those you got you got tensions, right? Yeah. Um I remember there was an exchange, I believe, between um what is it? It's David Card, who's like the the he won, I believe, uh a Nobel for um basically doing research into uh minimum wage, revealing that in in some markets minimum wage actually does not create like uh um negative employment effects. And um James Buchanan is like a very infamous um you know um economist, he's just like this violates the laws of supply and demand, and it's like you know, maybe in micro if you're following kind of those models, but you know, there are other ways of looking at things, and the other thing is that the social reality is always changing, right? There there are no iron clad laws, right? There are always exceptions and violations and things like that. Uh-

Khalid Kadir: I do think economics is going through its own little civil war right now. I'm really inspired by the rethinking economics folks who are trying to blow that up and think differently about how the discipline works. There are those, you know, like in many, there are those who are kind of reformists, like, okay, let's add that into our model. And those who are pointing out that our entire approach to modeling and what what information counts and doesn't count in the discipline is always going to fall short. It's always has this sort of Western epistemological orientation and the idea that what what we're doing here is is the root of what's generally right and other places must be wrong. I think that that I'm happy to see that playing out. Uh it has barely got a foothold in Berkeley, but when you're the number one e com program in the country, there's it's hard to change because you're ranked high. Why take a risk? So I think that's part of the problem that we face here in that discipline.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, the other thing is just I'm aware of rethinking economics. There's also CORE, there's uh Donught, right? There's a bunch of these. Um and I think the way the field works as a whole, you know, you know, putting aside like departmental and and institutional politics is like the economics sort of, you know, if you want to think of it as a self-re-regulating organism, is relegating all this stuff to heterodoxy, right? And so if it's heterodox, then it can't touch the core of the field. And so there's a core canon, it will never change, it's eternal.

Khalid Kadir: Totally, right? Totally. Yeah, that does get us get them stuck, yeah.

Mike: But I do think there's a way to get people interested in um economics outside of of you know the academy and institutions.

Khalid Kadir: Which Ha-Joon Chang's done a lot of, you know, Economics User's Guide. He's really himself a development economist trying to look at it from a different lens.

Mike: Or. even um Danny Roderick's economics rules, right? Yeah. So there's that, there, there's what I'm doing, right? Like there's a lot of, I think, you know, if we can kind of make economics sort of uh uh populist, not in the political sense, but in the in the sort of like uh public ownership, like you know, getting people in the in the public interested and asking economic questions.

Khalid Kadir: I do wonder if we're gonna need a new word. Because too often people hear the word economics and they think it's just all about money. That's what I'm saying. And I think that's part of the point we're making, is it's not just about money, it's about actually history and culture- 100 % I mean money's like an outcome.

Mike: It's actually not even about money. If you go to an economics program, you don't actually study certain money, right? I mean, I guess there's some macro stuff, but like for the most part, it's like you know, they have these abstractions that we are mapping onto things like money and right and and then the other thing, and you know, very good economists know this, but it's it's often often backgrounded, most of economics is implicitly taking place in the space of institutions and norms, right? Yeah, and like part of my work at Misaligned Markets is like looking at the assumptions that actually Really drive markets, right? Markets are institutions, markets are created, they don't grow out of the ground, they're not like some natural force of nature. And sure, transactions happen when people freely exchange. Yeah. But the things that they're exchanging, the rules of exchange, those aren't natural. How value gets constructed?

Khalid Kadir: How value gets constructed. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Creation of scarcity, all these kind of games. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike: What opportunities people have in the market. And when you think about the way people, you know, make money, it's not by doing, you know, a marginal cost curve and like optimizing within that. It's often, you know, looking at the social reality, looking at opportunities in a social reality, looking at opportunities in the institutional reality if there are gaps in those institutions, right?

Khalid Kadir: There's something that this reminds me of. You know, the shoe company Allbirds. Yeah. They're becoming an AI firm. And it's like, how do you go from making wool shoes to becoming an AI firm? Because you're following where the speculative bubble is. It has nothing to do with what you do, but you found a way to raise a bunch of funds, and it gets at this point of that, like there's a different process playing out here. Yep.

Chapter 5: Moving from engineering

Mike: So I'm trying to, as I like think about your story, kind of understand. So you you wanted to do good in the world. How did that like how did that manifest until you wanted to go upstream? Because there's some people who would just go into engineering and just do it. Do it, do it, do it harder. Like like, okay, like if I can just invent like a the most efficient process ever.

Khalid Kadir: Do engineering for good. Get people out of the way, we can solve this. Yeah, yeah, 100%. I think that's a great question. And I don't know that I have total.

Mike: There must be something about you that made you open to this upstream perspective as opposed to because you you mean you're you're technical enough, you could have made a good a good company. 100%.

Khalid Kadir: Math came, frankly, math came very easy to me. Math was math was once I had it drilled in me enough, I have I could do math all day. Uh like uh I took honors math through undergrad because I liked it, I was good at it, and so I rolled with it. So I wasn't afraid of it. I think that was part of it. I think there's a thing about when we learn something and it's really hard to learn, we believe it. Because we struggled so hard to get it, we see it to be truth. We have a really hard time then taking the step beyond that to seeing it for what it is and isn't. So, you know, like we like sometimes people learn a skill, it's really hard for them to learn it, and then they just want to do that one thing over and over because now they got it down. They figured out how to do it. Uh, my son, he's finger knitting. All he wants to do right now is finger knit. There will be a day when finging is very boring to him, right? But right now he's grabbed onto that and he figured it out. And it took him a minute to figure it out, and so now he's running with it. And I think that because I was never like like woo-woo on math, I was like, okay, I figured it out, I learned it, I'm good at it, I took class after class, but I it it was like it wasn't a thing that I was barely hanging on to that made me sort of like sort of worship it in a way. I was, I understood it enough that I was comfortable questioning it and thinking beyond it. I think that's part of it. I think part of it is I I wasn't, I didn't have like a career objective. I wasn't trying, I never intended to stay in academia, that's for sure. Uh, I always thought I would do something more development-oriented. And uh, and so I didn't have this allegiance to producing knowledge in academia, published fine to get my PhD, but I wasn't really, that wasn't my long-term plan there. And so that led allowed me, without knowing it, it allowed me to not chase uh institutional path that lifts myself up, you know, because I have a certain set of skills, let me use those to produce more publications, to climb a career ladder. I didn't have that orientation. So I wasn't, I I I could switch it up anytime I wanted. If if next week I, you know, find a way to become a professional fisherman, I could do that, you know? And so like I felt very open to the world in that way. In my own, like before this, I mean I raced bicycles as a professional for a while. Like I was pretty, I have a a little bit of a nonlinear path even to grad school. And so I think that that lack of attachment to a career, the lack of attachment to a discipline left me very open. And then you add that with a desire to understand. And I think that's something in many engineers, they want to understand things to fix them to make them better. You put that together with the lack of like pressure to adopt a certain frame of understanding. I think that really helped. Another side of that is that um, you know, came up racing bicycles, tech and cycling is a big thing, and uh there was always new stuff. And my older brother, who really brought me up in this in this space, uh, kind of rolled his eyes at a lot of new tech. And you know, you you do that, you wait two seasons, and nobody's using that new tech anymore because they realize it was junk. And I came up with that framework that, like, I mean, he made me use toe clips and straps for like two years before he allowed me to get clipless pedals. He sort of said, You have to do your time. You don't get to like get this thing that's like the elite thing until one, it's proven, and two, You don't need it. You can still ride your bike and you can still be almost just as fast, really, at your level. And it taught me to also be a little like subdued about technology. So I also wasn't chasing new and bright and shiny. I valued, you know, things that were old and time-tested in that sort of sense. I think you put those together like I wasn't chasing technology, I wasn't chasing ideology, I wasn't chasing career. Those, and that is heavily a function of my own privilege, that I didn't have to chase many of these things. And I think that really left me an open world. I also like taking classes. I like learning. And I then there was the sort of serendipity of taking that city planning class. And really, there were three grad students, uh, three women who were all PhD students in city planning, who more or less took me under their wing and forced me to read Timothy Mitchell. Uh and I resisted. I read the introduction like three times and I didn't understand it until they pushed me into the books.

Mike: That's like your core.

Khalid Kadir: Yeah, that is. It's stuck with me today in many ways. Yeah. Because Mitchell really does bring together the

Mike: ...energy, power, politics.

Khalid Kadir: Exactly. He thinks about the material basis for our politics. I find that fascinating.

Mike: Right, exactly.

Khalid Kadir: That, like, you know, there are no politics if you don't have a business model. Like you, like every every party knows this. So it really feels like it grounds it in more than ideology, but in a material root, which I which is political economy, right? So

Mike: That's that's political economy one-on-one.

Khalid Kadir: Yeah, totally, totally. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there I am teaching that class, right? The other piece that I teach a lot on is poverty. And I think it's political economy is for me the single most useful lens to understanding poverty in terms of trying to do something about it, in part because it's so multidisciplinary. So yeah.

Chapter 6: Justice and intellectual honesty

Mike: Um there's two threads. One of them, I guess, as a follow-up directly is um would you attribute your willingness to go down this path due to any particular values? I know you talked about open-mindedness, but like what I what I fathom is like you know, I would I wouldn't say that I came into college with with like a defined moral world worldview, but obviously if I were to look back kind of retrospectively in my own story, part of the reason why I am writing at Misaligned Markets is I think there is a sense of you know justice or you know, kind of like egalitarianism that is driving me to kind of want to answer these questions in the first place, right? Um and I'm wondering for you, is that sort of one reason why you gravitated towards non-engineering classes in the first place? Um, or is it is it something else what drive you drove you to these uh other classes before moving?

Khalid Kadir: There's definitely a moral foundation behind this. Yeah, no question. Um there's a prophetic hadith in Islam, and it's and it's was written on the sword of Muhammad, and it was speak truth even if it's against yourself. And so to take that seriously means to be like forever questioning of oneself at some level and to have a commitment towards honesty. And I translate that also into intellectual honesty that like I'm not gonna roll with something because I understand it and it sounds good to me, but like I really want to understand better. It it is it requires embracing critique, right? About to understand the complexity of things and and to to never feel oneself in the position of knower with that capital K. And so I think that like taking that seriously is like a journey of exploration and and and growing that never ends in some way, uh, some ways. And I found political economy like a useful lens, but there's a praxis here that's oriented towards justice, right? That ultimately, in many ways, I think that really guides what I think about. It's I would find it some people certainly do it, but I find it really strange to be thinking about international development and poverty and to go down this journey and start learning more about injustice and colonialism and sort of the horrors. I mean, horrors beyond horrors, and to not recognize the extent to which this is ultimately really a justice issue. And then you start running that forward to today, and you're like, oh, that didn't just end, you know, like colonialism's not done. It's just taking on a new form. And in some cases, it's still an old form. Look at Palestine. That that settler Colonial 101. And so, like, seeing how these forms of injustice continue to live with us today and a desire to do to do better and to be part of something better, I think is a big part of that.

Mike: Yeah, that makes sense. I can kind of relate to that in a sense of like, you know, there is, you know, wanting to understand the world for its own sake, which I I think I do um have that tendency, but there's also a sense of like, you know, imagining or or thinking about the possibilities of what could be, and that necessarily requires you to to think counterfactually about what the world, you know, is like now and and how could it be different, right? And and why is it the way it is, right? Yeah. And some of those questions are questions of justice. That's just uh, you know uh a like a normal part of that that that um process. The other thing I I kinda want to pick at is one of my favorite um T B tropes articles. I don't know if you know about T B tropes, but it's basically it's a nerdy website where people create uh listings of Wikipedia articles of basically tropes in media, right? Okay, you know Sounds interesting. So you take a TV show, you list all the things it does, right? Like Damsel in Distress obviously is a classic trope. That sort of article. My favorite trope is called ontological inertia. And so the idea of ontological inertia is basically if something exists but it ceased to exist, the effects of the thing don't go away.

Khalid Kadir: Yeah. Right. It's kind of like Timothy Mitchell's the state effect. It's not necessarily what the state does but it's the idea of the state. Right, right, right, right. Okay.

Mike: And so we have all these processes that have played out some of them are still playing out but just because some processes have ended doesn't mean that we don't observe their effects. Like you know just because the witch has been defeated her spell may persist for you know-

Khalid Kadir: Totally. Yeah that's deep. I like that yeah okay.

Chapter 7: Developing the Political Economy 101 syllabus

Mike: So, for you, like put me in the headspace of of putting together political economy 101 so when did you go from being a student to being like I want to teach this I want to um kind of educate people about this and like how did you put together that first syllabus like what made you grab the first set of books and readings which I should note is my first class with you but your it was your first year teaching right what year was that, 2011?

Khalid Kadir: What year was that, 2011? that was my first let's see 2011 spring was the first time I taught that class and fall was the second yeah yeah uh didn't quite happen in that way it was more I was teaching in the fall of 2010 not political economy and my boss at the time said hey could you teach this class in the spring and I was like-

Mike: Wait what department were you in? Were you in IAS or-

Khalid Kadir: At the time called ISSP IAS yes and now it's ISSP um but I should know this-

Mike: International Area Studies for the listeners.

Khalid Kadir: For those who aren't caught up in all the acronyms ISSP is interdisciplinary social science program so that's the current name of it. And as the name implies it's a teaching program with a number of different majors and minors uh and I was teaching in the Global Poverty and Practice minor which is a fantastic minor amazing program that does things differently which I really appreciate. We can talk about that if it's interesting. Uh but uh they asked me if I would teach PE 101 and I think my boss saw that I was capable of it um and-

Mike: was that department chair was it Karras or who was it?

Khalid Kadir: It was Max Auffhammer at the time. Shout out to Max at the Econ department-

Mike: Oh I didn't know Auffhammer was okay because yeah yeah I knew he was in um the um was it agriculture econ

Khalid Kadir: Was it, hold on, was it max at the time I think it was Max uh I know in my interview Karras was there Brad DeLong was there long was there yeah and I don't remember who else was there I think it was Max that asked me and Alan and Brad were in the interview when they formally you know went through the process to make sure that you know let me let's suss them out you know and here's the long like a giant in these spaces so uh uh but a nice guy so that helped um and then you know starting to think about the syllabus the real challenge I had so to give some context 100 and 101 are the two theory courses in political economy major 100 is classical 101 is contemporary so 100 takes you all the way up into Keynes Polanyi and Keynes is like a transition 101 goes from Polanyi and Keynes onward. So we're talking about 20th 21st century right um and and we're talking about state capitalism and things that are different at that point in time right and to to one like what the canon is I mean that's it's it's we're not in sociology where everybody knows you got to teach Weber right that's like there's no question about it right once you get past the classical theories which are pretty canonical and and well described yeah I was careful about universal but I'll go with the but they're limited yeah right highbrunner's literally listing all the they taught that book I don't know they still do but they did yeah 101 is more complicated like who who are you supposed to read as the canonical thinker about the 1970s and the transitions like there's a huge I don't think we've established a canon. So we we in the process of creating the syllabus tried to put together what I think makes sense for a canon and you know everything from Harvey and and Marxist writers to thinking about like writers about financialization and and writers about you know neoliberalism and all these different things to try to frame this as a canon and the tension that I felt was uh and it still lives with me today I I I complete I don't think I did this when you took it the last reading in Poli Econ 101 at Berkeley in my section of it is a speech by Russell Means who is an Aglala Native American Activist uh who has since passed. And the title of the piece is For America to Live, Europe Must Die. And he argues that if we need to let go of all of these European theories and ideologies, if we want to live differently in the world and to thrive in the world. And he he's writing to Native students who came to the academy, who end up being leftists and reading Marxism and going down that road. And he's like, look, these are all extractive ideologies about, like, you know, Marx is fine with industrialization. He just wants it to be owned by the people and the workers, right? And this is means his perspective. Uh and so he tells us that all the things you've studied, and this is how I feel about pretty much most of the syllabus, I'll say what the syllabus does is it it helps students uh gain exposure to the ideas that drove decision making at the times that decisions were made. Independent of the rightness or wrongness of these ideas or the the the how how accurate or inaccurate we now understand them to be. It doesn't matter if you believe that there's a window there and you go stand by it so you can see what's happening on the street. What matters is that you believe that. And if enough people believe it and they're standing there, even if there's no window there, they still think there is and they all went over there. And so, kind of my attitude to this class is I'm not gonna teach you what I think is right and wrong. I'm gonna teach you what people believed was right, those in power, and the decisions that drove the way they made their their the ideologies that drove the way they made their decisions. So it's very much a sort of history of ideas, the ideas that dominated, but in that way it is the dominant thinkers, primarily white, primarily Western, right? And I give some of the critiques to the major critiques that come from other places, but there is space for a Polycon 102 to think about counter ideas and alternative economies and other ways of thinking about the world to open students' minds to understand that there are radically different ways of thinking about political economic possibilities that we haven't begun to explore. We're exploring the dominant paradigms and the critiques of those paradigms. That's different than understanding radically alternative paradigms. And there I turn to things like, you know, ideas around the pluriverse and the different approaches that are out there that some scale, some don't scale, but they're different ideas of how we might relate to one another and deal with distribution of resources and power and whatnot. Right. So coming up with that syllabus was really an exercise in what I want people to understand what decision makers were believing at the time they made decisions and the ideas they referenced in a non-cynical way. Sometimes they'll reference ideas, but they don't really believe them. But it's it's a tool. I don't want to engage with, I don't worry about that too much. I'm more concerned with the ideas that they referenced as being important to them and then understand how they've shaped the world the way it is and some of the problems that come with that.

Chapter 8: Future course: Political Economy of Your Life

Mike: Right, right. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Are you really thinking of a 102 or is it-

Khalid Kadir: I've been thinking about 102 for years. I don't know that it's ever gonna happen. You know, what it's one of the challenges of thinking about a curriculum is it's always easy to add more required courses onto it.

Mike: I'm learning that lesson myself. Going through a bunch of readings for my my project, and so I'm now at 40 books. I gotta kind of uh not books, 40, 40 pieces of writing. Some of them are articles, so maybe it's not actually that constant. But it's yeah. There's always always one more uh one more thing you could always add. Yeah, one more, one more angle.

Khalid Kadir: And you know, learning to learning to draw boundaries is super important.

Mike: It's the most important thing, arguably, in my view.

Khalid Kadir: And then also having humility about what you know because you did draw those boundaries. I think that's the other side to that that I think often gets left out. So I think that's really important. Yeah. One thing I'll say is I do have an opportunity next spring, I'm gonna develop a new class. And I think I've been mulling this class for a long time, and I think what it's going to be is the the running title is like political economy of your life. And the idea is students are graduating from Berkeley, they're about to go out into the world, they're gonna have to think about housing, they're gonna have to think about jobs, they're gonna have to think about health insurance, they're gonna have to think about retirement. All of these things have these interesting political economies behind them. And so I want to make these things that are very real in their lives, so it's very relevant. And it's also at the same time simultaneously teaching people to say, well, okay, I get that I'm thinking about an IRA or a 401k in this professional job, but what I'm really thinking about is building a mountain of wealth. And everybody else builds a mountain of wealth. Wow, this is a super inefficient system for everyone's society to have their own mountain of gold just in case they live to be 105. They need to save up enough instead of a more socialized care that you have like in the Nordics or something to draw attention to folks, the the politics of the kinds of systems they're entering into.

Mike: Yeah, the other thing is just uh the counterfactuals, right? I mean, 401ks weren't weren't always a thing and-

Khalid Kadir: Absolutely not. I'm on a pension. Yeah. One of the few.