Transcript: How much cash would it take to quit your job? With Pilita Clark and Mouhcine Guettabi

This is an audio transcript of the Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes podcast episode: ‘How much cash would it take to quit your job? With Pilita Clark and Mouhcine Guettabi’

Soumaya Keynes
I love my job. I really do. Particularly the FT canteen where you can buy kombucha and mint chocolate Cornettos. But recently I found myself wondering what it would take to quit. How much money would I need to walk away from the world of work and spend my days playing the guitar, learning to draw? How generous with a universal basic income have to be for me to pack it all in? Probably quite a lot. But my day job is economics and we can do a bit better than that. This week we are going to ask: how much money would it take to quit your job?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

This is the Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes. Later, I’ll speak to Mouhcine Guettabi of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. But first, I am joined here in London by my wonderful colleague Pilita Clark. Pilita. Hello.

Pilita Clark
Hello, Soumaya.

Soumaya Keynes
Have you thought about how much money it would take you to quit your job?

Pilita Clark
Not exactly, but I have thought about how much money I want to have when the time comes that I do quit my job for whatever reason. And I have to say, I really have never been able to settle on a number. It’s quite difficult actually. So having gone through that process, I think it’s too embarrassing to say how much money I’d need to quit my job. And it’s not entirely because I love the FT and all of those lovely kombucha drinks and mint and chocolate Cornettos. It’s all part of it, obviously, and being able to work with brilliant, lovely colleagues, as you and I both do. But the thing is, replacing all of that and replacing the lost income leads me to an embarrassingly large number. And I don’t see the FT, let alone society, ever coming up with that number to my satisfaction, unfortunately.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah. I mean, strategically, it’s probably not the best number to tell the FT about either, right? Because they’ll be like, oh, you love working here so much. Great. We’ll pay you £20 a week. Brilliant.

Pilita Clark
That is very true. And of course, it’s not entirely theoretical because from time to time, the Financial Times, like most large organisations, offers you money to go away. And it’s actually, I believe this is not exactly a state secret, but it’s capped here at about £100,000 from memory. And, you know, that’s a sizeable amount. And one could do a lot with that. But is it enough to make me really want to leave the paper? Well, there are good days and bad days, but I think on most days I’m inclined to say no.

Soumaya Keynes
OK. Yeah. I mean, I guess I’ve got enough years of writing for the FT left in me but it would absolutely not be enough. I’m staying here. Sorry for everyone who really hates my columns. OK, so I mean, you know, clearly this is a real question. I think, you know, some people have their own spreadsheet. There are people, I think, in finance who are just kind of counting down the day till they hit their number, and then they can ride off into the sunset. I actually went down a Reddit rabbit hole. There’s a lively industry of people discussing how much it would take them. One post suggested 25 times your annual expenses, and then you can withdraw 4 per cent of that a year, which is the interest. And then you can just kind of live off that and it will never run out.

Pilita Clark
Yeah. I mean, that doesn’t sound entirely mad to me. And although again, depending on one’s expenses, you know, that ends up being a very large number probably. But it doesn’t sound crazy because the thing is, you don’t . . . I know so many people who have quit or have retired and have ended up being quite unhappy because they’re constantly worrying about money. And I think that’s something that weighs on me.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah. And just to get a bit more of kind of internet journalism underneath my column, there were the reader comments where people were just desperate to give their number or to just throw out numbers that they’d heard. And it was sort of the order of magnitude of kind of 5mn, $10mn.

Pilita Clark
And so that’s interesting. All right. So let’s just go back a little bit here, and I’ll say that if anybody were to offer me $1mn, I would be absolutely, I think, in there like “Flynn”, as they say in Sydney, you know. I mean I don’t think I’d be mucking around much. I mean $1mn, that’s enough probably. All right. Let’s say £1mn just to be on the safe side. So I think that’s probably enough to get me to go away.

Soumaya Keynes
Oh, OK. All right, well, anyone who really hates Pilita’s columns, you know, the door’s open.

Pilita Clark
Right. Get those phones ringing. Yes.

Soumaya Keynes
OK. But, you know, realistically, the number is probably going to be lower if you’re a bit older, right? If you’re deciding, do I retire next year? This year being handed, you know, even £100,000 is probably going to make that decision pretty easy for you. What your outside option is, right, if you have this burning passion to be an amazing songwriter, then actually maybe you would be more sensitive to big lumps of cash. OK, well, look, we could do better than internet journalism, and we probably should do better than that. Because there is economic research looking at this question of what people do when they are handed huge sums of cash, right? How much would it take for people to just up and leave their job? And, you know, this isn’t a question just for financial planners. This is also a relevant issue for policymakers, right? Because one of the political debates you hear is about, you know, welfare benefits, you know, a concern that if you give people lots of money, they’re just going to take the opportunity to laze about and play video games all day. Particularly you hear that in the context of the debate around universal basic incomes.

Pilita Clark
So, I mean, you know, when I think about my own view on this, I guess what I’m really always wondering is what does the data say?

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah. And and obviously this is just a really challenging area because you look out there in the real world and you want to know, OK, so-and-so, get some cash, what do they do next? But it’s really hard to know if they’re really responding to the cash or actually something else is going on. There are plenty of studies where economists have tried to look at this. But being certain about A causing B, the money causing people to quit their jobs, is it just quite hard to pin down?

Pilita Clark
Right. Well, why don’t you walk us through some of those earlier methods that have been tried when it comes to working that out?

Soumaya Keynes
OK. Yeah. So one early method was to look at what people did when their partner got a raise. Right? And so OK, the household gets a windfall. Do people then quit their jobs when the household is much richer? That’s kind of iffy though, because it could be that people were trying extra hard to get a raise because they knew their partner was about to quit their job. Right. So you don’t know if the quitting was in response to the raise, really, or if it was going the other way round. There is another method which is to look at what happens after people get unexpected inheritances. So that’s probably a slightly cleaner way to look at this effect. But the challenge there is that, how unexpected really were these inheritances. But also often their data is just horrendous, right? It’s really hard to know how much exactly the inheritance was. And so calculating that response accurately is just it’s just quite hard.

Pilita Clark
Yeah. In fact, there was one study, I think, in economy, right, a couple of weeks ago, a European one. All they said was people inherited something like at least €5,000. Well, it’s completely unhelpful, really, isn’t it?

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah. You could kind of hear the frustration in the researchers, right? There was this amazing survey on inheritances and then the respondents were not asked to be any more specific then. Was it over €5,000? Yeah. Not helpful.

Pilita Clark
OK, so but there are instances where you can suddenly come upon quite a large sum of money. And I’m thinking of, say, the lottery. And some people fascinatingly have in fact studied what happens to those people who are lucky enough to win.

Soumaya Keynes
Yes, yes, that’s I think, probably the cleanest way of doing it. And there are some really good papers being published in really top journals trying to do just that. So there was one quite recently published that was looking at American lottery prize winners and was able to calculate the response to that quite precisely. And so for every $100,000 of extra wealth, extra lottery winnings, the chances that the winner is employed falls by a little under 4 percentage points. Right, so . . .

Pilita Clark
Which is not nothing.

Soumaya Keynes
Which is not nothing. And if you multiply that up by 10, say, $1mn of extra wealth, that’s 40 percentage points. That’s you know, that’s a lot of people.

Pilita Clark
Yeah, and I know it also makes sense, right? I mean, if you’re heading up towards a million, then you’re much more likely, in my humble opinion, to be thinking about quitting.

Soumaya Keynes
So but they also have these other quite interesting results. So they find that there are differences between people, right. So poorer people are more likely to quit their jobs. No real surprise there. Rich people are more likely to stay in work, but they are also more likely to reduce their hours so rich people will carry on working. Let’s just work a little bit less.

Pilita Clark
That’s interesting really, isn’t it? I mean, sort of suggests you might shave a day off a week or something, but you still probably enjoy your job enough to want to keep going in. And yeah, it’s interesting.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah, I think that’s probably what I would do, work a little bit less. And the other effect they find, which is super interesting, is that on average people move to worse-paying jobs. Right? So maybe they were, you know, nose to the grindstone. I’m working in something that makes me a lot of money, but I don’t really enjoy. And actually, now I’m going to pack it in and follow my passion.

Pilita Clark
I mean, that also makes sense, you know. I mean, if you’ve been slaving away, I don’t want to name a profession. And I’m certainly not going to say accountancy, but you know, if you’ve been doing that for many, many years, but secretly all you’ve wanted to do is study to become a vet or something, I don’t know, I mean whatever . . . 

Soumaya Keynes
Being a vet is really hard.

Pilita Clark
Or a vet’s assistant or something that you might adore animals. There may be lots of things, and I can imagine that if you had the cash to hand and you could pursue that, of course, why wouldn’t you?

Soumaya Keynes
OK, so Pilita needs $1mn and she wants to become a vet. We’re learning a lot here. OK, so there is this US study, there also other studies, right. So there’s also a study of Swedish lottery winners. And they actually find smaller effects than in the US. So in general, it does seem that the US studies find that people are more likely to quit their job in response to cash than they are in Europe. So I guess us Europeans just really love work or something.

Pilita Clark
Now, I detect a slight amount of irony there Soumaya when you said that. I’m not sure 100 per cent that Europeans really want to work more, but I, you know, there’s so many differences between the two regions. I’m just trying to work out why. In fact, there would have been that difference between the US and Swedish lottery winners. My first instinct is to say it’s got something to do with the social safety net. But actually, when I try to think about why that would be, I’m not 100 per cent sure why that would work out. What do you think?

Soumaya Keynes
It’s very complicated comparing Europe and America. I mean, you’ve got differences in social safety nets. I think that this comparison does, I think, account for differences in the tax schedule. So I don’t think it’s that, you know, Europeans take longer holidays than Americans. So maybe like the grind is less extreme. They’re not kind of gagging to leave their job because actually they already have kind of nice holidays. But I’m really speculating here. So maybe let’s go back to the the boring world of studies that we know.

Pilita Clark
Yes. Now there’s one study that you’ve written about that I’m really interested in, and it’s another one based on a lottery, but it’s based on a super enormous, huge lottery, El Gordo, as they call it in Spain, the Spanish Christmas lottery. I think the findings of that study is really interesting. So it seems that in the areas where there’s lots of winners — because without going into too much detail, that’s how it works there — you can see a definite link between having lots of winners and higher start-up rates, more jobs being created, more self-employment. So it seems the message of that study is that if people unexpectedly come into quite a lot of money, they may in fact work even harder setting up their own businesses, which is really interesting.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah, and I mean, definitely what proponents of universal basic income would love to point to, look, you know, we’re giving freedom to people to, you know, be entrepreneurial and get the economy going.

Pilita Clark
Exactly. And I will say that it also suggests that the idea that if you pay everybody large amounts of money or reasonably large amounts of money, they won’t just sit at home watching video games, they will actually use it to do some really important and economically useful things.

Soumaya Keynes
OK, well, look, why don’t we move on to the next way of finding out what happens when people get cash, which is to look at what happens when the government starts handing out cash to lots of different people. I spoke to Mouhcine Guettabi of the University of North Carolina Wilmington, who looked into this question in the context of Alaska, where there is already a sort of basic income in place. I started by asking him about the history of the scheme and also how it works.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Mouhcine Guettabi
Alaska discovered the oil in Prudhoe Bay in 1968. It’s the largest oil find in North America, and they decided to set some of the money aside, set up the Alaska Permanent Fund. And in 1982, they decided to take some of the earnings from this very large savings account that’s valued at about $80bn today, and start distributing a portion of the earnings from this fund to Alaska residents. So on average, Alaskans receive roughly $1,600 per person. And it’s been running since 1982.

Soumaya Keynes
OK. All right. Well, that’s a nice chunk of cash. I want to ask about the research that you did looking into the effects of this cash on people’s employment. So the question of does giving people money encourage them to just, you know, stay at home. But how did you do this? Because doesn’t everyone get the money? So how do you know what would have happened without the money?

Mouhcine Guettabi
So that’s one of the biggest difficulties in studying the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend. So there are really two ways you could potentially approach this question. You can go back to the original distribution and try to do some sort of pre-post, meaning the Alaska Permanent Fund was set up in 1982 and you can say, we’re going to look at what happened in Alaska after 1982 and compare Alaska to the other states. That’s massively problematic because, as I said, Alaska discovered oil. There was a lot that was going on. So that exercise is really, really challenging. What we ended up doing is we basically say, OK, in October, basically everybody receives these checks. We can’t really do the typical difference-indifference or a comparison of Alaska to other states, because labour market seasonality is massively problematic. The Alaska labour market basically jumps by about 15 per cent over the summer so comparing to other states is problematic.

Soumaya Keynes
Why is that?

Mouhcine Guettabi
Fishing. Nice weather. Tourism. So a lot of seasonal industries.

Soumaya Keynes
Nice things.

Mouhcine Guettabi
Yeah. Very nice things, yes, that make living in Alaska worth it. But, so what we do is we leverage the timing to . . . we have a, the fact that basically right around October, everybody receives this payment. So we have variation across time. And the more important variation is that we leverage the variation in the amount that people receive. And so the size of the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend is a function of the returns of the Alaska Permanent Fund.

Soumaya Keynes
Right. So what you’re doing is you’re looking to see how people respond when this fund gets a bit more generous. But just to get a sense of the kind of magnitudes involved, what’s the minimum and maximum level that this fund has ever been?

Mouhcine Guettabi
I think it’s best to think about it as essentially having varied between 1 and $3000. So our results are essentially leveraging that variation between 1 and $3000.

Soumaya Keynes
OK. And that’s per year.

Mouhcine Guettabi
That’s per year per person.

Soumaya Keynes
OK. Well, that doesn’t sound like that much money. Although I suppose over a family it would add up. So I guess my prior is that that isn’t having a massive effect on people’s work decisions. What do you find?

Mouhcine Guettabi
So let’s start with women. So for women, we find that an increase in the size of a PFD by $1,000 essentially results in them reducing the number of hours that they work by a little more than an hour per week. So just to kind of give a little bit of context, on average, women in Alaska work about 25 hours a week, so that’s almost a 5 per cent reduction in the number of hours that they work. And one of the things that’s important to note is that this effect gets a little bit bigger when we focus on women who have younger children. We interpret that effect as essentially women taking some of the PFD to be able to buy themselves out of the labour force for a couple of hours a week for the months following the distribution.

Soumaya Keynes
OK and I mean, that is in line with other evidence suggesting that women are particularly sensitive to cash. They tend to be the primary parent and so, you know, that their outside option is maybe more magnetic than that for men. But let’s talk about the men. What did you find for them?

Mouhcine Guettabi
Yeah. What’s interesting is that we find completely different results for the men, and we find on the extensive margin. In other words, the probability of employment actually increases for men, and it increases by about 1.7 percentage points.

Soumaya Keynes
Well, OK, so you’re paying people money and they work more.

Mouhcine Guettabi
What you want to be thinking about here is the demand side of the equation, right. And so most people tend to focus on I’m going to give people money, they’re going to stay at home, they’re going to play video games. What they fail to think about, the fact that if you give people money, that’s an injection of resources into the economy. And as a result, you need to think about a Christmas type of factor, right. And so you need to think about retailers needing to hire workers. You need to think about restaurants needing to hire waiters. And so that’s essentially really what we end up finding is that there is the stimulative fact that ends up resulting in an increase in employment for men. Again, along the extensive margin, we don’t find anything on the intensive model meaning conditional on men working. We don’t find them changing the number of hours that they work. But we find this increase in the share of men who are employed, which means that the demand side actually dominates the supply side. In other words, the stimulative effect of the PFD ends up being larger than whatever potential reductions are happening at the margin.

Soumaya Keynes
OK, really interesting. I guess my next question is, what do you think the lessons are for policymakers thinking about the effects of windfalls? Should they be very cautious?

Mouhcine Guettabi
A lot of the concern around distributing money typically is stated in terms of young men staying at home and quitting their jobs, right. And so I think we can fairly conclusively refute that hypothesis. And in fact, from a welfare perspective, we may not think that women choosing to be home with their young children, for example, in this particular case, is necessarily bad for society, right? And so to me, we don’t find a lot of the evidence that policymakers are concerned about, right? A, they tend to completely ignore the demand side effects, and we find stimulative effects. And then when we do find reductions in terms of employment, we find that for a subset or a group that potentially is using that money to do something else that maybe is also productive for society. Right. And so to me, these are results that are fairly encouraging, right? They’re encouraging because we don’t really find any evidence that there are these disincentives to work. And for men, ie the group that we hear a lot about, we actually find that the demand side dominates the supply side and that it’s stimulative and results in an increase in the share of people who are employed.

Soumaya Keynes
OK, my last couple of questions. You used to live in Alaska, right? When you were at the University of Alaska, did you get this payment?

Mouhcine Guettabi
I did.

Soumaya Keynes
OK. All right. Well, then my final question is, did you ever think about how big it would have to be for you to quit your job?

Mouhcine Guettabi
I have to admit, that’s never crossed my mind.

Soumaya Keynes
Oh, such a dedicated scholar.

Mouhcine Guettabi
Yeah, that’s never crossed my mind. And I always give the wrong answer and use the econ term. What I think about this is, that I say I think money is fungible. And we used to receive it, and I never really had a dedicated fund for what we did with it. It was just, you know, money that got deposited into the account. But no, I have never in my 10 years there thought about how big the amount needed to be for me to quit my job.

Soumaya Keynes
OK. So I’m going to take away from that it would be extraordinarily large.

Mouhcine Guettabi
Maybe, maybe I made too much money. Maybe I made too much money. I don’t know, maybe that’s why it never crossed my mind.

Soumaya Keynes
Well, that’s a lovely reason for not to cross your mind. Mouhcine, thank you so much for joining me.

Mouhcine Guettabi
Thank you for having me.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Soumaya Keynes
OK, back in London with Pilita. So Pilita, what did you make of that?

Pilita Clark
Well, to be honest, I found it a bit depressing to see that there was such a sharp difference between the way men and women responded, to see that women seem to leave paid employment, whereas men were able to go into more paid employment for whatever reason as a result of these payments. Or at least that’s the suggestion. That to me didn’t seem to be like the sort of effect that one would like to see.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah, I mean, I guess it’s not ideal if something looks like it’s increasing the inequality between men and women, which is already pretty large. I suppose my glass-half-full possible explanation of what was going on is that we know from previous recessions in the US that men’s employment is much more cyclically sensitive than women’s. So in a boom time, men’s employment will tend to rise much more than women’s. So it could have been that actually, in response to all of this cash, there was just a difference in demand for men versus women, right. So maybe jobs in construction soared, right. Whereas demand for the jobs that women are more likely to do didn’t really change that much because they’re just not as sensitive to to demand.

Pilita Clark
Yeah. Right now I can say that probably makes sense, actually. I’m not sure that I feel 100 per cent better as a result, but it’s not so black and white. I can say that it is complicated.

Soumaya Keynes
OK, well, we should throw to a break now, but when we get back, I want to chat about some hot new research on a recent experiment with a universal basic income that has some unexpected results.

[UNHEDGED PODCAST TRAILER PLAYING]

We are back from the break. So, Pilita, did you see this new research on the basic income out there in the wild?

Pilita Clark
I did see this research, and largely because our excellent colleague Chris Giles wrote about it in a column a couple of weeks ago. It wasn’t quite a universal basic income that was being paid. It was money that was paid to people who were on low incomes, average household incomes of $30,000 a year. It was only people in Texas and Illinois, but these people got $1,000 a month for three years. So that’s a 40 per cent increase in their annual income. So that’s quite a lot of money.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah. And that’s a lot more than we were just hearing about in the Alaska case. And presumably an incredibly expensive study to run.

Pilita Clark
Yeah, very expensive to run, costing apparently $60mn, which is the sort of money that most researchers can only dream about. Now, the reason that it was so lavishly funded was because it was funded by Silicon Valley figures like OpenAI’s Sam Altman. And of course, in Silicon Valley, universal basic income is an idea that has a lot of enthusiasts because these tech pros, as we call them all too often, are looking to a future where their robots are going to be taking our jobs. And so if there were such a thing as a universal basic income, that might do all sorts of things like, you know, contain a backlash, keep people reasonably happy and keep them earning the many, many, many millions that Sam Altman has accumulated.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah. I mean, we, you know, we can have fun about their motives and all. But, you know, I guess of all the things that Silicon Valley tech pros are going to spend their money on, academic research isn’t the worst. So I’m here for it.

Pilita Clark
I completely agree.

Soumaya Keynes
OK. So the hope was, I think, that this study would prove advocates of UBI right. That actually most people would stay in work, they wouldn’t just drop out, but also if they did stop working or they work less, they would use the extra time they had to do all sorts of life-improving things. Right? People should make their own choices and they’d make good choices and that would be great.

Pilita Clark
You’re right. That was the hope. But the first of these studies found that it’s not exactly what happened. People did work less. So the study showed, for example, that these payments led to, quote, a 2 percentage point decrease in labour market participation and a 1.3 to 1.4 hour per week reduction in labour hours. So that’s not nothing. You know, that’s quite a distinct fall that was recorded there.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah. The study’s authors call that a moderate effect. And actually, if you compare it with the results of the earlier lottery studies, it’s kind of comforting. It’s sort of in the middle of those results. And so, yeah, I think overall, for some people, the answer to the question of how much would it take you to stop working is $1,000 a month.

Pilita Clark
Yeah. And, just thinking back to your earlier conversation, I mean, there was no obvious difference, it seems, between the way men and women responded to this extra money.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah. Although I’m not sure how much that was a problem with the power of the study to find those effects, rather than them finding very precisely and exactly that there was a zero effect. Right? I think it was more of a we’re not quite sure about this, and I think they’re going to wait for the administrative data to sort of confirm that more concretely.

Pilita Clark
So that’s really interesting. So the other thing they found was that the people who received this extra money did increase their leisure time. It’s not 100 per cent clear what they were doing in their leisure time. They could have been going and seeing their mates. They could have been sitting at home playing video games. They could have been doing all sorts of things. But anyway, they did increase their leisure time.

Soumaya Keynes
And that’s nice for them.

Pilita Clark
It’s great. You know, I mean, I wish I had more leisure time myself. Yep. I think we can all agree on that. But the really interesting and I will say, the disappointing result for people who are big advocates of universal basic incomes is that people didn’t necessarily use their extra time to do things that are societally or economically useful. They didn’t, for example, save to invest. They didn’t try to get a better job, although there were some younger people who used the money to upgrade their skills, get better qualifications. But I think it’s really interesting that we just didn’t see the sort of dynamism and the kind of change in activity that advocates of UBI suggest is likely to happen.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah, I mean, there was that, just thinking back to that Spanish lottery study. In this one, they did look at whether participants used the extra time to start a business. Apparently they use the extra time to think about starting a business, which is not you know, that’s fine. But they didn’t actually start one.

Pilita Clark
OK, but they thought and you know, we have to also bear in mind that these are the initial results from the three years of trying these payments, and we don’t know what might happen in years to come. I suppose it’s possible that the extra money could have some long-term effect.

Soumaya Keynes
I mean, maybe. I guess there will be follow-up studies. I mean, I guess, you know, thinking about takeaways from this research, basically, you know, Chris Giles’s takeaway was giving people money makes their lives better, and it gives people without much money to begin with, some time off. And that’s nice. But, you know, giving them this money doesn’t have magic effects. We shouldn’t have excessively high expectations of what people are going to do. We live in a world of difficult trade-offs. We need to accept those.

Pilita Clark
Yeah.

Soumaya Keynes
OK, look, before we finish, there is one final way of finding out what people would do if they got a ton of cash, which is asking them. So there is actually a recent study of Europeans that did this, and they just asked people, and people sort of said what they would do. They found that below around €25,000, people say that they would just carry on working. But for sums between that and about €100,000, the chances of working falls by about 3 percentage points on average. They do actually find differences between men and women. Women as well as people who are older are more likely to drop out in response to that cash. But yeah, there is the simple route of just asking people how much cash it would take.

Pilita Clark
Right, and I think the big takeaway here is that people do have a price. We just need a few more Sam Altman-inspired studies to pay for all the research it’s going to take to figure out exactly what it is in all cases.

Soumaya Keynes
Look, if Sam Altman wants to offer me a sum of money, you know, see what my price is, he is very, very welcome to do that. But for now . . .

Pilita Clark
It’s, get in line, is all like, yeah.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah. For now, I’d say I love the FT canteen. I’m going to carry on eating mint Cornettos. And we should call that a week. Pilita, thank you so much for joining me.

Pilita Clark
Thanks so much. It’s been fun, Soumaya.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Soumaya Keynes
That is all for this week. You have been listening to the Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes. If you enjoyed the show, then I would be eternally grateful if you could rate and review us wherever you listen. This episode was produced by Tamara Kormornick and Edith Rousselot, with original music from Breen Turner. It is edited by Brian Urstadt. Our executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. I’m Soumaya Keynes. Thanks for listening.