John Y. Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai: Empowering Consumers with Economic Education

Announcer: The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the St. Louis Fed or the Federal Reserve System.

Scott Wolla: Welcome to Teach Economics from the St. Louis Fed, where we deliver practical advice and simple strategies to make economics click for students at every grade level. On this episode, we’re joined by John Campbell, professor of economics at Harvard University, and Tarun Ramadorai, professor of financial economics at the London School of Economics and Imperial College London.

The two recently wrote the book “Fixed,” which was published last fall. In the book, they make the case that economic and financial literacy are essential tools for helping consumers navigate a complex landscape of financial products. But before we get into their book and how it applies to teaching personal finance in the classroom, we’ll start with what sparked their initial interest in economics.

So, as we get started, John and Tarun, how did you find yourself in economics?

John Campbell: Well, my path into economics was somewhat unintentional. I grew up in England, which has an educational system that encourages a lot of specialization in high school—far more than in the U.S.—and I didn’t want to specialize. I didn’t know what I wanted to do.

My father was a historian. I loved history, but I also liked mathematics and was curious about science. But I couldn’t commit to a career in natural science, which is what the English system of specialization encouraged me to do.

When I was going to college, I looked around for something to study that would be less specialized, and I chose a course they have at Oxford called “Philosophy, Politics and Economics,” or PPE. The joke about PPE is the initials really stand for “pretty poor education.” But actually it was a good program. I became really fascinated by the economics component and decided I wanted to pursue that, and that it would be a way for me to combine my interests in history, human affairs and the way society is organized, with some analytical mathematical thinking that I was also drawn to.

Tarun Ramadorai: I hadn’t heard John’s story before. There are huge similarities between John’s story and my story, which is great. I suppose that’s how we’ve ended up as coauthors.

I also grew up in a system in India which required you to choose very early. And the two real options for people of an analytical bent of mind were either to do engineering or to do medicine. I didn’t really fancy either one of those options.

I then applied to Williams College, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts. I went over there and took courses that kind of spanned the spectrum from linguistics and psychology on the one hand, to physics, mathematics and economics on the other.

Economics felt like a conservative middle choice. But in the end, it turned out to be the one that stuck because it allowed me to use both sides of my brain at the same time. And I haven’t regretted that choice since.

Wolla: That’s great. It’s great to have a relationship as you wrote the book. In fact, speaking of your book, “Fixed,” it was listed in the Financial Times on the list of best books of the year. It’s critically acclaimed. I read it. I’ve been hearing a lot about it. It’s really interesting because it’s very different than your typical personal finance book. So, if you could spend a few minutes talking about why it’s called “Fixed,” and what you see as broken.

Ramadorai: Maybe I can kick off, and then John will jump in afterward.

The reason that we call it “Fixed” is because the title embeds a dual meaning. The first meaning is that it’s fixed in the sense that a system is rigged, or set up in such a way that it benefits insiders at the expense of people who are participating in the system sometimes unaware of the deeper machinations of the system.

But the other meaning of “fixed” is a much more optimistic vision—and that’s toward the end of the book—which is that we feel that the system can be fixed in the way that a broken machine can be fixed. And we have concrete proposals to try to fix the personal finance system.

I should just very quickly say that the reason that we’ve called it “Fixed” and deliberately chosen such a provocative title is because we feel like there are structural problems in the personal finance system of today that require addressing and diagnosis. We try to do the diagnosis in the first part of the book and then the proposals for remedies toward the end of the book.

Campbell: This focus on the system as a whole is, I think, what sets us apart. Your typical personal finance book takes the system as given and says, “Do this, do that, do the other thing.” We sort of zoom out, and we say, “You know, why are things so complicated? Do they have to be so complicated and difficult?”

Another special thing about the book is that we take a global perspective. The advice books really, by necessity, have to be focused on a particular country, maybe even a particular demographic—young people, older people, whatever. But we point out that many of the problems are common to countries around the world. So, by zooming out, we can see more clearly what’s really going on.

Wolla: I found that really interesting to see both how some of the problems are global or not necessarily U.S.-focused, but also, knowing the landscape internationally, you saw how other countries and systems are actually doing it better in some ways, or there might be some solutions we can draw from.

Ramadorai: Yeah, I think this has been a recurring theme. In fact, before this book, John and I had written a survey article—in fact, two survey articles—that make this point quite explicit. In fact, we have a name for it; we call it “international comparative household finance.”

The idea there is to look around and scan the globe to see if there could be examples of particular context in which certain kinds of solutions work better, with the idea that maybe we can compile a set of best practices that can then form a guide for people trying to do reform in any given country, to try to borrow the best of what’s out there from different locations.

Wolla: So many people think that personal finance comes down to bad choices: excessive risk-taking, perhaps low financial literacy. And as you just stated, you argue more that the system itself is broken. What does that mean in practice?

Ramadorai: Given that this is for an audience of people who may be familiar with economics, I’ll refer to a very simple economics concept, which is that of demand and supply.

One way to think about what we’re saying is that, when you say many people think about personal finance failures as coming down to bad choices, we do agree with the fact that the human brain is not necessarily wired to do the very complicated calculations that are required in finance—trading the future off against the present, or dealing with situations of great uncertainty where you don’t really understand the outcome.

All of this is about the demand for financial products and services from households or from individuals. But we also argue in the book that the supply side—the energy of the supply side—and the energy of capitalism also in some ways get perverted because of these mistakes that people make in their decisions. What people want isn’t necessarily what they should want.

What people want and what they need may be quite different things. But of course, in a capitalist system, firms and suppliers respond to the incentives of what people want, not what people need. And that then generates these poor incentives in the system. And I think that’s what distinguishes our work in some ways from many others in this space.

Campbell: Related to that, people are very reluctant to shop actively in personal finance. I mean, some people like shopping in the retail sense, but basically nobody likes personal finance shopping. And as a result, firms don’t always compete on quality and price; they do branding. A simple example is that many bank branches that you see on a typical Main Street are not really centers of business activity. They’re closer to billboards; they’re advertising the existence of the bank.

People stick with familiar providers, and that gives firms in the industry some market power. And then you get markups, price dispersion and really a benefit from shopping that many people will give up because they’re so reluctant to shop.

Wolla: You spend time in the book talking about the complexity of many financial products in a world where people don’t always have expertise in navigating that terrain. And you recommend some great ways or solutions for how the system could be easier for consumers to navigate. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Ramadorai: Sure. I will try to describe what I think is the problem, and then maybe John can talk a little bit about our proposed solutions.

Precisely because of the fact that these decisions are so hard, the incentives are pushing toward almost making the choices even harder. If you can add complexity and obfuscate the choices even a little bit more, sometimes you can create features of the environment that direct people toward dominated choices that may be very beneficial to you as a product supplier.

We all know about contrast effects and behavioral economics; for example, if you go to a restaurant, they will put very cheap bottles of wine, very expensive bottles of wine and then outrageously expensive bottles of wine on the menu. So, you might be tempted to go for the merely too-expensive rather than the outrageously expensive choice on the menu.

There are many of these kinds of choices that you see in financial products and services. Complexity is a response to the incentives that the firms have that are given to them by the fact that either people don’t shop or don’t really understand the choices that they’re making.

Campbell: One example of this is firms often bundle products together, and that makes it harder to see how expensive the thing really is. What we advocate for is the creation of a set of simple, standardized financial products that we call “starter kit products” that everybody should be encouraged to begin with. We’re not trying to ban other financial products, nor are we trying to override the market and set the prices of the starter kit products.

But we want to set the design of those products and the units in which prices are quoted, so they become much easier to shop for.

Maybe an analogy would help: If you have a headache and you need an over-the-counter painkiller, you go into the pharmacy, and there’s a shelf called “painkillers,” and you see bottles of, let’s say, ibuprofen. There’s the brand name—a couple of big-brand names—but there’s also probably the pharmacy brand—the generic brand. The dosage is the same. The active ingredient is the same. The little label on the shelf tells you the price per unit, and it’s extremely easy to shop for ibuprofen.

We’d like to make shopping for personal finance products with this starter kit as easy as that.

Ramadorai: I should add one thing, which is: This analogy is quite instructive in a way, because one might wonder why anyone ever buys the nongeneric version of ibuprofen, right? Yet, people do buy the nongeneric version of ibuprofen; otherwise, we wouldn’t see them as ubiquitously on the shelves, which is to say: Even in a situation in which these products are so comparable, there is still this incentive for firms to advertise this stuff. Now just take that incentive and multiply it by whatever factor you want in a situation where the choice becomes much more complicated.

Wolla: Earlier you mentioned behavioral economics; we’re talking about choices. The first round of behavioral economics, through books like “Nudge,” led to some changes; for instance, people are opted in to retirement accounts instead of automatically opted out. You argue that perhaps the nudge was the first step, but it might not be far enough. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Ramadorai: Sure. Maybe I can kick off, and I’m sure John has thoughts about this as well.

I would say there are two or three things, which, of course, come in many different varieties. Some nudges can be as simple as disclosures. Other nudges can be a little bit firmer, such as auto-enrollment in a pensions program, for example—in a pension savings plan.

Now, as far as disclosures are concerned, the evidence seems to be cutting in the direction that they’re quite weak medicine. It doesn’t really seem to generate very large effects or even not very long-lasting effects.

The problem with setting a default is that, while it has been a great success in the sense that you have pulled a huge number of people potentially into the retirement savings system, the choice of those numbers can actually be very important, because, for example, you could set the default contribution rate into your pension too low, in which case people under-save and then only realize that many years after the fact.

Or you set it too high. We’re seeing increasing evidence that when you “squash the balloon in one direction” by increasing the amount of contribution, it comes out in the form of debt that they’re taking on—unsecured debt; maybe they take higher mortgage debt without really realizing the invisible deductions that are coming from their paycheck.

Wolla: That’s a really great example. In fact, one of the things that I appreciate about the book is that it offers a lot of different solutions. If you could implement, say, one or two fixes tomorrow, what would make the biggest difference?

Ramadorai: John, do you want to start?

Campbell: I certainly think the thing I just mentioned—the provision of a universal, portable, simple, easy-to-use retirement account—would make an enormous difference. It would take us away from this world we’re in where we keep adding different types of tax-favored accounts. There’s a profusion of these, but profusion can lead to confusion. And then people, maybe, don’t take up any of this. So, something simpler and more universally available would be very important.

There’s also some low-hanging fruit—easy things to do. I’ll give an example from the mortgage system: In this country, we have a mortgage market institution called “points,” whereby instead of being offered a single rate, you’re offered a menu of rates, depending on whether you borrow a little more or less. It’s very tricky to figure out. And there’s a lot of evidence that it confuses people, and they make bad choices. There’s really no reason to have that institution at all. So, I would sweep that away.

Wolla: In reading your book, I got the perspective that it’s a bit like a three-legged stool, in that, you have regulation, better product design and increased financial literacy. Would that be an accurate assessment?

Campbell: Yes, I think that’s absolutely right. We’re in a race between the complexity of the system and the level of financial education. We should absolutely promote financial education, but we should also slow down the process of creating complex products.

Ramadorai: Yeah. I completely agree with that. I don’t think it’s a choice. I feel like it’s a false binary. We as educators, and as educated people, we have a strong belief in the value of education, and rightfully so. It really is something that is transformational.

We began this interview by talking about our own educational experiences that led us to this place, and those were obviously transformational for us. Similarly, financial education can be transformational, but if you make the task too hard, then it just discourages people. That’s also quite important for us to recognize. Imagine that you’re trying to tell people that they really have to keep up with the experts, with a constantly fast-evolving system where products are just moving at the speed of light—even more so now with the technological revolution—then it leads very quickly to despair, unless you are actually able to slow down the pace at which innovation occurs, allowing people to catch up and learn about these types of products.

Wolla: We’re going to take a short break. When we come back, John and Tarun share their thoughts on how teaching economic principles helps consumers make more-informed choices.

[Break]

Hi, I’m Mike Hyman, an Economic Education specialist here at the St. Louis Fed. If you’re an educator, we know finding creative ways to engage your students can be a challenge. That’s why we created Page One Economics. Each issue provides a short overview of a timely topic that offers students an opportunity to learn economics. You can find Page One Economics at stlouisfed.org under Resources for Teachers and Students.

Wolla: Welcome back to my interview with professors John Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai. We’ll continue the conversation by discussing the growing interest in personal finance among college students.

John, you introduced a personal finance course at Harvard that went from 70 students to 300 in a short period of time. What surprised you most about that as you taught it? Why do you think there’s this huge demand for that course? And do you think it’s just about Harvard students, or do you think it’s more universal?

Campbell: Oh, I think it’s much more universal. What surprised me was, I thought I was introducing a very basic economics course, sort of an easy course, and freshmen might take it.

Actually, the demand is very strong from seniors who see the real world coming at them. And also something I’m very pleased with: first-generation college students. About 20% of the students in the course are first-generation students. Harvard is admitting more of them—which is great—and those are some of the best students because they’re interested in everything; they want to bring their expertise back to help their families, their extended families, their communities.

It’s very far from the stereotype of privileged kids that want to learn to trade stocks. These are people who really want to understand credit scores, how to get out of a debt trap, mortgages, what to do if you’re middle-aged and you have inadequate retirement savings, and so on and so forth.

I think students intuit that personal finance is more important than ever. People are living longer, higher education and housing are more expensive. The products are more complicated. They get that, and they want to get some savvy. So, they’re flocking to get this material. And there’s a lot of intellectual content in the material, so it really can be a very worthy college course.

Wolla: I’m curious. Knowing what you know and doing the research and the writing that you’ve done in the space, how does that change the way you teach personal finance, do you think, from the average curriculum that you might find in a college personal finance course?

Campbell: Well, I try to get away from the purely mechanical aspects of personal finance. Obviously there are calculations you have to know how to do. You have to be able to understand what an APR is and do some calculations surrounding that. But a lot of the important issues are broader and really drawn on concepts from economics. This is why I think personal finance is a great way, actually, to teach economics.

Let me give you a couple of examples. One of the things I have the students do early on is look at data on the cost of living across cities. That’s relevant for them because the seniors, at least, are considering jobs that may be in different places; a lot of them may want to move to New York for their first job. They need to understand that New York City is very expensive, relative to some other places they could live. So, they look at data on that.

Once I’ve done that, concepts like inflation, thinking about things in real terms, what the real interest rate is—all of that becomes much more intuitive to them.

Another example is, later in the course, I show them the flier that Harvard puts out to its employees in the open-enrollment period when people have to select a health insurance plan. As you know, there are low-deductible plans and high-deductible plans, and some are much more expensive than others. That helps them get the idea of adverse selection. It gives it a sort of intuitive grounding.

What I really try to do is use personal finance as a way to teach them economics—very basic economic concepts. Once they have those, that’s going to help them think about new situations and new calculations that they might have to do in the future.

Ramadorai: This is exactly the sort of thing—  I don’t teach a personal finance course, but I do teach courses that involve some elements of these kinds of things. There are two things that I’d like to echo: The first is, I’ve just moved to the London School of Economics, and the motto of the London School of Economics is rerum cognoscere causas, which means “to know the causes of things.”

That’s quite appropriate here, which is to say: What you really want to do is to not give people fish, because that’s very quickly obsolete in personal finance. You don’t want to just give them some fish; you actually want to give them a fishing rod and tell them how the framework operates.

So, in that sense, simple lessons like—  If you are contemplating a financial decision, it’s very important to pay attention to the scale of that decision. That seems like a very important lesson that you should learn, which is to say: You might be focused on a percentage, but you should really be always focused on dollars. For example, even a 1% or 2% differential on a mortgage price is going to be much, much more impactful for your life than even a 30% differential on something much smaller, like an extended warranty plan on a stereo system.

So, thinking in that way can sometimes also say, “You’re right now in a situation which is quite vulnerable. This is quite an important moment in your life. Here’s the point at which you really need to start thinking.”

Wolla: That’s great—using economic principles in a personal finance course. How about using personal finance in your econ course? So, you’re teaching principles of micro. Do you think there’s room to fit personal finance into that intro level or across the curriculum?

Ramadorai: Oh, absolutely. It’s interesting, because I think household finances is having a moment at this point. And it’s not just a moment; I think this is quite a durable aspect. And I think there are two reasons for that. The first is, we’re starting to realize—with all this data that we now have access to—that this sort of distinction between micro and macro is a little bit fictitious.

Why? Because we now have access to enormous amounts of information that actually facilitate very clear aggregation up to the macroeconomic aggregates that we’re looking at. But differently, the kinds of choices that people are making are actually feeding into the bigger things that we’re seeing out there. And I think that’s quite an important lesson.

So, I would say it’s not just about the way that you would use finance—personal finance—to teach micro, but it’s also about the way in which little decisions that people make can sometimes add up to something that’s quite big on aggregate. So, that’s one way to think about it.

The other thing is in the study of public economics—tax incentives for personal finance and the study of industrial organization—which is actually what we’ve been talking about—the interaction between suppliers and demanders of financial products.

There are lots of different areas of economics that could benefit from an injection of personal finance to really illustrate some central concepts.

Wolla: You’ve also mentioned that math is a great context for teaching personal finance. Can you talk a little bit about why math is such a great way to introduce personal finance concepts?

Campbell: One reason is, finance is one of the few places where ordinary people today—almost everyone—really need to do some math, some calculations, and some of those calculations might be seen as very low level. But the concept of exponential growth, for example, is key for understanding the compounding of retirement saving and the cost of debt. But of course, it’s also very relevant elsewhere—for understanding the spread of a pandemic, let’s say, or for many natural processes, you need to understand exponential growth.

I think personal finance is the easiest way for most people to get what exponential growth is. So, it does fit naturally into the math curriculum.

What I think is also true is that, if in high school, let’s say you try to keep the math out of it, there’s a danger that what you teach becomes pretty mechanical—“Do this, do that. Look at this number and compare it with that number.” The danger is, if you don’t have the ability to teach it with some math, then you’re going to end up having something that’s very geared to the immediate needs of today, but that’s going to get out of date over time.

That’s a big problem because high school kids are not yet making most of the big decisions. Maybe they’re deciding about taking on student debt, maybe they even get a credit card, but a lot of things that are important in life are going to come much later. So, I think in high school, you need to try to give people some general skills that they can use later when they do face a big, major life decision.

Wolla: Yeah, that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently: When do you teach personal finance? As you just mentioned, a lot of times, if you’re a teacher—  High school students are learning about decisions that they’re not actually making. They’re learning about mortgages or retirement accounts or tax shelter savings, when, in many cases, they can’t even pursue those decisions if they wanted to.

You mentioned that at Harvard it’s the older students that are really motivated to take your personal finance class, which makes a lot of sense because they’re about to make those decisions. And then there’s just-in-time education all the time: “I’m about to make this decision, so I’m going to go out and find some information, and try to educate myself.”

So, is this a decision where we should advocate for all of those things? Or is there a particular home that personal finance should live in?

Campbell: I think we have to do all of the above. I’m a big supporter of personal finance education in high school. I’m on the board of the Council for Economic Education, which is a nonprofit that promotes those curricula, and I think that’s very important to do. But for the reasons you gave, I think we can only expect so much from that.

College financial education is very worthwhile. I’m really involved in that at Harvard. And there’s a movement across the country to offer these sorts of courses in colleges at every level. I think bringing education later in life is also important.

One thing that, of course, is happening is people are using AI. They ask AI, “What should I do?” My view on that is that’s going to be very helpful in providing education to adults, provided that adults know enough to ask the right questions—to give the right prompt. I’ll give you an example from the course I taught in the fall. On the first assignment, I asked the students to go to AI, a large language model [LLM], and ask it the following question: “I’m buying a car. I need a loan for $24,000. I can get a one-year loan at a 10% interest rate, or a 10-year loan at a 1% interest rate. Which should I take?”

What happened, or at least what happened last fall—it’s obviously a very changing landscape—but AI, the language models, did a lot of calculations, presented it beautifully with numbers, math, and so on, but ended up saying the total interest you’ll pay, adding up interest over the life of the loan, is going to be higher with the 10-year loan at 1% than the one-year loan at 10%. So, unless you’re incredibly short of money and need to minimize your current payments, take the one-year loan at 10%.

Now, that’s really bad advice because a 10% range is outrageous! You can get a much lower rate if you shop around. A 1% rate, on the other hand, is a great deal for a consumer loan, and you should definitely take it. You can put the money in a savings account and get 4.5% and earn the spread. And furthermore, if you don’t like having a loan for 10 years, you can pay it back early.

So, the language model did the mechanical answer but completely missed the point. Now, I think if students know enough to frame the question right, then they can get AI to do the calculations. But it’s not yet at the point where you can completely trust a large language model to advise you. Combined with AI, I think it’s going to be the future.

Ramadorai: I think this is a really good point. The other thing I should also mention is: Do you think that the suppliers don’t have access to the large language models themselves? Of course they do. So they’re going to prompt them with any kind of question that they believe a naive demander of their financial products is going to stick in there, and then try to come up with something that’s sort of LLM-proof. I mean, that’s the way that innovation has always worked. So, you’re really creating a race to the bottom unless you are able to put in the simplification and the guardrails that we touched upon in the middle of this call.

Wolla: if you think about the way personal finance is taught, either at the high school or college level, are there things that you would change either in the curriculum or in the way it’s taught?

Campbell: What I would like to see is a little bit of a broader view of the system, kind of parallel to what we do in our book. The courses often take the system as given; they say, “You’ve got to do this calculation, that calculation. This is what happens to your credit score if you do this, that, or the other thing.”

But step back and say, “What’s really going on here? What are the underlying economic principles at work?” Let me give you a couple of examples. The economic idea of opportunity cost is super important. Suppose you go to a bank, and they say, “We’re going to give you a free checking account.” Well, is it really free? No. You’re giving up interest. So, the opportunity cost can be really meaningful. Understanding that is the first order.

Then think about incentives when financial products are being offered to you. If a salesperson is really promoting something to you, you should ask yourself, “What’s in it for your counterparty? What are their incentives?” Perhaps they’re suggesting something that’s really good for them and not so good for you.

Now, it’s not that we want to make students completely cynical and mistrustful. We think that’s very dangerous because then people will try to opt out of the financial system altogether, which is a bad idea. But we do want to make people more savvy in a general way. Putting more of that in the curriculum would really help.

Ramadorai: I completely agree with that. One of the things that we can try to do—to try to make it less in the classroom and bring it out—is to encourage students to use their standard savvy and common sense principles.

In economics, common sense goes a long way, right? Some of these kinds of prescriptions—  Think about what your counterparties would stand to gain from it; think about the scale of these decisions, and how you would imagine those; what are the alternative uses that you can make with the money—all things that a very savvy parent might have taught you at home.

It is important and it is contingent upon us to reinforce those messages, rather than to double down on the fiction that many students have: “This is all very complicated stuff; it has to be very technical, and I have to use my technical brain rather than my common sense brain to engage with these ideas.”

Wolla: So, if you could pick out two things that you would want your students to remember, say, five years from now, after they leave your class, what would they be?

Campbell: I think one would be that shopping is rewarded, and customer loyalty is typically not rewarded. A mistake many people make is to think, “I’ve been a customer of this bank for years. They’re going to treat me better than anybody else.” Well, actually, no. What you’ve done is demonstrate that you’re not paying any attention, and you’re likely to be treated worse than other customers at the bank. So, that would be one simple principle.

Tarun, you want to add anything to that?

Ramadorai: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things I wanted to talk about is that often when we discuss household finance, we start by showing a picture of what the household balance sheet looks like, which is to say: What are the main assets that you have on your balance sheet, and what are the main liabilities you have on your balance sheet?

I think that is quite a useful organizing principle for thinking about where the importance of the decisions really lies, which is to say: A house is going to be a very important, big purchase. Education financing is going to be a big, chunky expense, and you should really think about that. Retirement savings is going to really build up to become a very large component of your balance sheet, so you should start thinking about that.

On the liability side, you’re going to take on a big debt when you buy a house if you’re financing it with a mortgage.

So, if you’re going to really exercise your—  If you want to make your head hurt, those are the places to make it hurt.

Wolla: That’s good.

Campbell: Right, don’t sweat the small stuff. Really take care of the big items.

Wolla: That’s great advice.

This podcast has a large audience of educators. What’s the one thing that you would want educators to take away? You can talk about more than one. What are the big ideas that you would want someone to take away from the ideas in your book?

Campbell: For education, we’ve been talking about the fact that personal finance is an incredible window into economics, and that economics makes personal finance education more effective—less mechanical and more effective. So, I hope that’s a lesson that many educators listening to this podcast will take away and perhaps feel inspired by.

Ramadorai: I would say one other thing: One of the things that education can sometimes do is to focus on just providing information.

But I hope that the messages of the book will also help serve the other purpose of education, which is to inspire, which is to say: There is a different way. There’s a better system out there. We can find it collectively. We should be pushing in that direction, as opposed to just taking the system as given.

Wolla: So, John and Tarun, I want to thank you very much for spending time with me today. And thank you for all that you do for your students and for your audiences.

Ramadorai: Thank you very much.

Campbell: Thank you, Scott.

Wolla: Thanks for listening to my conversation with professors John Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai. I hope you found the discussion as enlightening as I did. If you liked the show, please subscribe wherever you get podcasts, and take a moment to leave us a review. Each one really helps.

Until next time, I’m Scott Wolla from the St. Louis Fed, and you’ve been listening to Teach Economics.