Choice Cuts - the Best of The Why Curve so far

[00:00:00] The Y curve with Phil Dobby and Roger hearing.

[00:00:04] 82 episodes in 82 weeks.

[00:00:06] Mathematically simple.

[00:00:08] That's the story of the Y curve so far.

[00:00:11] And so far we've covered a whole gamut,

[00:00:13] contemporary topics,

[00:00:14] developing deeper than most mainstream media.

[00:00:16] War, public services, society,

[00:00:19] the royals, the economy, politics.

[00:00:22] We've touched on all of them.

[00:00:23] And we've spoken to a lot of experts.

[00:00:25] It's been a genuine learning experience.

[00:00:27] And it doesn't stop here, but at least understand it. Have you ever heard of siege mentality? It's something very recurring in Israeli strategic thinking.

[00:03:01] Paraphrase brutally. Everybody's against us. And because now, you know, big question marks about Israel's tactics in that war. Seems, seems, I mean, even if they have momentary pauses, any of them going to move into a form of permanence. He's found what on earth happens next in Gaza, and they won't really know. So there's a war with no obvious conclusion.

[00:03:03] There's another one, of course, that fits that bill.

[00:03:05] The Russian invasion of Ukraine in the process of getting there. And you know, at least 10,000 civilians have died in that water. So far, we don't actually know that. I think it must be a higher number. And certainly the combatants on each side, vast numbers. And the suggestion now that in a way, the West maybe is getting bored or tired of it,

[00:04:21] not supporting Ukraine enough and in the end.

[00:04:24] Tell the way to end though, just to design a system that charges people to access care, that is a fair and efficient way of raising extra revenue. One of at all that something is clearly badly amiss with our system. I think what it comes back to, though, is that a feature of our system, in particular, or is that a function of the amount we have invested in that system over the time and how well we run it?

[00:07:03] Because there's nothing that is fundamentally incompatible

[00:07:06] with a tax-based system like the Health Service. as to whether actually it was a lifestyle choice. Well, we spoke to Joanne Costa-Ephon, who's professor of health economics at the London School of Economics. And he said on a Y curve episode from September called Tough Medicine, if you pay to help someone lose weight and they continue with their behaviors that added to their weight, should the NHS really keep on paying out?

[00:08:21] Right, so I think that if you're helping them

[00:08:24] and they continue doing the same,

[00:08:25] it means that you're not very effective at helping them, right?

[00:08:28] So that means that you need to reconsider incentive or any change in prices. We live in context where actually acting rationally is very difficult. It's what's called the nudge. They used to call nudge in, isn't it? Equating things in a way that make it easy for people to do the right thing. Precisely. And there's different ways of doing that. We could nudge, for instance, influencers.

[00:09:41] So these days, the nudge agenda has evolved to the point that there's different ways I see it would work anyway, but it's not just a health service that's in a bit of a state. Politics, obviously, also a bit of a life support machine at the moment. Unelected Prime Minister holding on for as long as he can. Yes. Failing to live on any of his five promises. Remember those? Well, why did you bring down inflation? I mean, it wasn't him, but he personally brought in and put it. Yeah, right. Also brought in the Foreign Secretary,

[00:11:00] who wasn't an elected representative and to rush David Cameron to the House of Lords.

[00:11:05] Is that desperation tactics or what?

[00:11:08] I think so, isn't it? Royal pardon kind of idea. Well, I mean, why not actually make it a given that we do have a royal family that doesn't have a lot to do really apart from, you know, go to openings and stuff like that? Why don't we actually make it the job of the king to actually determine who is given

[00:12:22] night?

[00:12:23] Well, in theory, I think that's the way it's the experts versus, you know, the people who know nothing can just be elected by the people. So supposedly the House of Lords is Doctor's Scientist, Economist, maybe at a push. And 28 year old assistants from Downing Street now as well. So yeah, so the whole idea of who gets in there,

[00:13:42] it's no longer based on expertise. Well, exactly.

[00:13:43] It's, there's experts in there

[00:13:46] and you can always go through a list of appointees of course, you know, so I mean, is that a failure in the system where we have a prime minister where even fewer of course voted for risks. Well, we wasn't even elected. It was just it was a show. So what's going wrong? Is it time for change? Do we need a written constitution, perhaps? Well, we sort of thought so, didn't we? But then we spoke to Robert Hazel, professor of government and the constitution at University College London.

[00:15:01] He was dead set against the idea.

[00:15:03] I'd rather go the other way.

[00:16:11] easier for members of the political parties at large to, in particular, be tempted to electoral the more populist leaders. We've seen that in both parties with the election

[00:16:16] in the Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn and with the election more recently in the Conservative

[00:16:23] Party with Boris Johnson. Well, just that is fair enough. I mean, this is a guy who's married. He held down a job. He's got three children. He's now a lot. Respectable. Yeah, well, you'd think so, wouldn't you? Now he's off to prison. And you think, you know, is that just a step too far? Because he was protesting about something that you would have thought we would all agree with. Unless you're trying to get somewhere fast and you've got the roadblock.

[00:17:40] Well, okay, yeah, but you know.

[00:17:41] What about ambivalence?

[00:17:42] You know, there's all sorts of learn things.

[00:17:43] But sure, all ambivalence is getting affected

[00:17:45] by road works and all sorts of things, don't they?

[00:17:46] Well, this is true.

[00:17:47] This is true.

[00:17:48] Anyway, we did an episode back in May. as reconciled is the value of protest as a social good, if you like. The fact that I don't agree with it, it just comes back to Russo and all those sorts of things. But the fact that I don't agree with it and perhaps vehemently oppose it, should not ever be a

[00:19:00] reason for somebody's rights to be taken away. Although it's, you know, it's all opinion, isn't it? But look, it isn't enough being done, it seems as we examined in an episode called World on Fire from July this year. But it's not too late. Surprisingly, Tim Lenton said he's found out of Global Systems Institute and he's also chair in climate change and the Earth Science System at the University of Exeter.

[00:20:26] We spoke to him.

[00:21:25] far the sea surface temperatures are outside of normal variability at various times in a bit of North Atlantic or Mediterranean and how crazy the Antarctic sea ice cover changes

[00:21:32] are. These are statistically, we're talking about, in some cases, what might be one in

[00:21:39] many tens or hundreds of millions of years, bit of warning. Yeah so christen is taking our El Nino, how bad would it be? It'd still be pretty bad wouldn't it? And then look at the you know keeps on going on, look at the example of the flooding that we've seen over the last week or so in Queensland, Cairpus. Crocodiles floating around. Actually jumping on planes and you know that's a nasty thing to

[00:23:00] the airports but not crocodiles basically. So it just keeps happening all right. Let's

[00:23:04] just impress everyone even further because we could talk about the economy indeed we should bound to be interested in investing in the US. After that, the EU market is a whole, though nothing like it's dynamic as the US is still very large for green technology because they've got a pretty big push in this. Britain on its own first, it doesn't have a really deep commitment to this energy transition anyway. There's very little government money going into it.

[00:24:22] And in any case, the market is small. I mean so far by EU regulation. So London is still quite clearly the financial capital of Europe. It's the second great financial centre of the world. There's a lot of financial skill. There are a lot of people from all over the world working in this sector. So we're doing OK in finance, but there's not really much incentive for people to invest in anything else in this country. But what about debt? Because debt is a thing hanging around our next public debt. Will the situation get any better if we cut government debt if we get back to austerity? Well, we got an answer on that. And the answer was no, it won't help at all. That's what the economist

[00:27:00] Francis Coppola said when we spoke to her back in January.

[00:27:02] That's absolutely a strong argument for investing the public sector spends that crowds out private And that's where we are right now. You won't have private investment apparently if the government isn't investing. You've got a prime to pump. Sadly, a pump prime of the economy, which is definitely not what's happening now. We're letting the price seize up. So what is going to happen now? Your predictions? Well, I mean, Rishi, is he going to last this year? Is he going to go through to next year?

[00:29:44] January next year, it's a real election.

[00:29:46] And then what's he going to start the bidding? Yes. Yeah, you have to be whoever had the worst double pneumonia to that man over there. That would be where we're going. Yeah, it's nice. And of course AI will take over next year as well anyway so it won't be anything to do with any of us. Well we won't be here, exactly. We'll all be entirely absorbed into the blob. Megan is going to leave Harry and live with Piers Morgan.

[00:31:01] Glucifer.

[00:31:01] Yeah, that's what's going to happen.

[00:31:04] We don't know, is the honest answer.

[00:31:06] We don't know what's going to come up but we will bring it to you here on the like hill.